Originally published in the Moultrie News.
How can I help my son become a better writer? He’ll soon be writing college application essays, and his skills are low.
If you’re only looking for help on college application essays, since these are usually written by semi-adults, many educators would suggest an adult tool: AI. It can help guide one who’s willing to learn in the same way as a personal tutor, but it’s a terrible option if he’s open to taking shortcuts.
If, however, you prefer an individual who can write well from now until forever, the process is more rugged. After all, you can have a rose in a year; it takes a lot longer for an oak tree.
It starts, of course, in school. This includes paying careful attention to the feedback given by teachers on papers and other writings.
That’s not common sense for every student. I know teachers who spend hours providing feedback on student writing, only to find it thrown into the trash, unread and unheeded. Unfortunately, many students are only interested in the final grade.
I generally prefer a few key, targeted comments plus an option to see me personally for more detailed feedback. Few students take me up on that, but the ones who do get a trove of personalized guidance. I bet most English teachers would be willing to do this for any student who asks.
It may sound counterintuitive, but perhaps the most important writing growth comes from reading. Author Stephen King says, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” adding that “reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.”
Thus, if your son’s not reading — avidly and deeply, fiction and nonfiction, short articles and long books — he’s depriving himself of the best writing instruction there is. Through reading, he’ll learn new ways to communicate to a variety of audiences. He’ll learn new vocabulary, new sentence structures, and new ways to develop ideas. Every professional work is an exemplar, so he should digest as many examples as he can. Ever notice that all the best movie directors love watching movies?
Of course, to write, you must have something of interest to say. Reading gives us that, too. It fills us with knowledge, insight, and ideas. Our experiences can take us far, but reading takes us the rest of the way, and the boundary is limitless.
It’s also important to understand grammar. Not just for knowing how to use commas and colons; that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s to understand things like phrases and how they connect to create meaning.
Do you know how participles work? Appositives? Simple, complex, and compound sentences? A person can write without understanding these concepts, but only in the same way a person can succeed as a football player who merely knows how to catch and where to run. To take his game to the next level, there’s a lot more about the X’s and O’s to understand.
I never considered being a professional writer until I took a college grammar class, complete with sentence diagramming. Only then did I begin to really understand how many options I had to write better. I learned there’s a lot more to carrying the ball than running left, right, or straight.
Unfortunately, few English teachers still teach such things. Grammar study in K-12 is virtually nonexistent. So to help your son with this, you’ll probably need to find an online course or a good print reference.
The final part of the equation goes back to what King said: you have to write. A lot. You can’t get better at chess without playing it. So encourage your son to write for different purposes: letters to family, blog posts, reports on subjects of interest, memorable events, short stories — all of it exercises a different area of the craft.
Good writers, like oak trees, take time. But just think how dreary things would be without them.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.
The fastest way to improve writing is to actually put ideas into words. Yes fragments at first, but notes are so important. When I was working with refugees, we would build out their sense of self and story over weeks or months, one fragment at a time. Daily, or a few times a week I would call and ask them to share how they feel, what they remember if a successful moment or time they enjoyed, or to tell me something they hope will come to fruition over their next chapter. I was clear: it is just something to think about - positively: who am I? What conditions in which do I thrive? What do I hope to feel or experience today or over the next week, month or year? Who do I want to be around?
As soon as they have even a word that connects to the one or two questions I've asked them that session, we wrote it down. Often I would write it and they would copy (being EALD new immigrants). Writing is a thinking process, and we must provide the conditions and skills - weust teach to ask ourselves the questions and learn to take note of our own answers and ideas as they come to us. This builds authenticity and cohesive writing. This is how he will succeed. Best wishes.