Email a copy of 'Teach your kids to write the perfect paragraph' to a friend
Loading ...Liked this? Get free email updates
Enter your name and email address below. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Loading ... Loading ...Trackbacks & Pingbacks
-
[…] going to be the one that creates a time travel machine because it seems like an original idea. It probably isn’t, and even if it were, you’d have nothing to write about. Pick something that you feel […]
-
[…] 2. Let kids write whatever they want. Kids shouldn’t write about something that doesn’t engage them. That’s how they lose interest in writing. They shouldn’t write about how a character has developed if they don’t find it interesting. Give them assignments that allow for flexibility. Give them assignments that they’d find interesting. An assignment on, “how can we improve schools?” is more interesting than “what literary devices are used in chapter 2?”. Let them voice their own opinions; don’t have them recite someone else’s. Show them that writing is a medium for conveying thought, for sharing ideas. Writing isn’t just tell what you read, writing’s a fun way to share your thoughts. And assign more writing than reading. More creative writing. Let students write about what they want — that’s how they’ll improve as writers. […]
-
[…] Penelope Trunk […]
-
[…] Teach your kids to write the perfect paragraph – focus on rhythm, insights, and uniqueness instead of what to write, says Penelope Trunk. […]
This is very good advice. I’m seeing it in action for the last 4 years of homeschooling and we are having good results.
Believe it or not, the curriculum we follow recommends a very similar method to the one you suggest here. It also recommends not teaching formal grammar because “it gets in the way”. My child is never given a topic but writes a page or two on something of interest. She learns form and function by reading good books.
In my state, we are forced to annually test homeschoolers. She is 12 and this year she tested nicely in all areas, but in writing she scored on a 10th grade level.
As soon as I read this post I had to did up a bunch of old emails from my youngest sister. Each filled with spelling errors, run on sentences, grammar errors, fragments etc…. But the stories she told often had me laughing so hard my eyes would fill with tears. An editor could fix the errors if she ever wanted to do something with her writing. My other sister coincidentally an English major gets all the technical stuff correct, it’s perfect, but she can’t tell a story thus she should never be a writer and fortunately she is not, where as my youngest sister could easily be a writer.
Sometimes to write a story the way I tell it I have to break grammar like crazy.
So many big ideas here, and really useful links.
I love that the internet is teaching kids to be better writers, to learn to be interesting if they want to be heard above the noise. I love fragmentences. I love that I don’t have to teach them that fragmentences are wrong. I love that I can use made-up words like fragmentences.
I used to think my kids weren’t interested in writing, just video games. Then today my son was telling me about the video game company he and his brother are going to set up when they’re older. His position is going to be called Head Storyteller, because “every good game starts with a good story”.
This post ( http://menwithpens.ca/dont-write-like-you-talk/ ) discusses #1. The caveat is you can write like you talk as long as you can talk – really talk – i. e. verbally communicate effectively. The author (Taylor Lindstrom) cites this advice from essayist Christopher Hitchens which she described as hated advice. So she wrote an amendment to the hated advice – “Write the way you talk – if you can speak persuasively, eloquently, and clearly.”
Oh. I’m not sure I’m going for that. Look at As I Lay Dying. Beautiful writing. Beautiful story. Ineloquent speaking. Also, Room — a more current (and totally amazing book) has a narrator who has stunted verbal skills.
The trick with writing with a cadence of stunted verbal skills is to be consistent. Which is, again, about rhythm.
Penelope
So many things popped into my mind as I read this post!
1. One thing that I find glaringly missing in this list, except for a brief mention in a parenthetical passage in number 1, is that kids learn to write by reading–reading things they love and things that make them want to read more. That’s the one thing that made me want to write, and made me want to be good at writing: reading.
2. Speaking of number 1, I totally believe that if I would have listened to my teachers about what makes “good” writing, I wouldn’t care about writing now. I write like crazy about things I care about, and part of the reason is because I made myself learn to not make myself feel guilty over occasionally starting sentences with “and” or throwing in an effective sentence fragment here or there, instead of learning to avoid those things, like my teachers intended. But still, old training dies hard, and now, as a teacher, I have to force myself not to point out such “errors” when I grade papers, even though I technically should, because I’m grading “academic” writing. But “academic” writing does its best to stomp out any voice, especially if it’s “good,” and that’s why it’s so excruciating to read, and why seasoned professors, who are supposed to read and write for a living, hardly ever read what their colleagues publish–they make their grad assistants do it.
Three, I’ve met several “creative writers” who went to grad school for creative writing. One of them is my best friend. Her degree didn’t make her a great writer; she was already that. It just helped her make connections. Meanwhile, the ones that started a creative writing program as terrible writers finished the program as terrible writers, mainly because they had a good story to tell but they couldn’t get it out without sounding stilted and boring. And creative writing professors only tell the really great students that they suck, while they tell the terrible writers that they’re great, because writers that are better than them are competition in an already ridiculously oversaturated market; everyone wants to be a writer. So the terrible creative writers got told over and over again that they’re wonderful at what they do. And what did they do after they got their master’s in creative writing, and couldn’t get anything published because they were terrible? Law school, of course.
Four, your section about adding personal angles to writing (and education in general) is a cornerstone of some of the teacher training going on in lots of universities, especially when it comes to teaching culturally and linguistically diverse students. Lots of teachers are being taught that the best way to teach concepts is to integrate personal knowledge and understandings. This sounds like a “duh” kind of thing, but it’s actually really difficult to teach teachers to do it, because, of course, their default setting is to teach as they were taught. And most teachers are white, English-speaking, middle-class women, who went to school with all other white, English-speaking, middle-class children and white, English-speaking, middle-class teachers.
Phew, sorry for the word vomit. :)
I homeschool my three kids, and we mostly read old books. They read, speak, and write with nuance beyond their years, and I’m convinced it is because they’ve developed the “accent” of good writing from listening to classic literature. The most painless way to learn! :)