Check out this post that gives some ideas for what to do this year for writing. 🙂
Archive for the ‘Young Writers’ Category
Do Formats Hush the Writing Voice?
If a writing format is the “house” then the writer’s voice is the life within.
If you start with a freewrite, you want to then think about what kind of format would best house the writing. Often, just revising the freewrite for clarity, a sense of humor, organization and powerful language is enough. You will wind up with a paper that is a few paragraphs long that retells or describes or narrates or exposes or instructs or remembers or explores.
However, as your child develops skill in writing, it’s great to introduce some of the more common formats for writing. In The Writer’s Jungle, I share about poetry, letters, description, and the dreaded elementary school report (it gets its own chapter).
Some writing curricula focus on formats almost exclusively:
- Write a portrait of your mother’s face.
- Write a narrative paragraph about last year’s birthday.
- Write an expository paragraph about Custer’s last stand.
- Describe the autumn leaves in two paragraphs.
These kinds of writing tasks can be perfectly fine for kids who write naturally and comfortably. The issue is helping them first get those words onto the page and then helping them reorganize those words into a form.
So if the assignment calls for an expository paragraph about Custer’s last stand, the goal is to write about that last stand that exposes to the reader details about that moment in history.
Do you now need to consult those websites or writing books that explain what a topic sentence is, how many lines ought to fit into the paragraph, what a clincher is and so on?
They may serve as guides (though I would avoid those that treat formats like formulas or recipes that allow for no variation). As a caveat, the SAT/ACT test evaluators don’t like to be able to “see” the format in the writing. They want fluency and smooth transitions, not obvious emulation of a rigid format.
A writing teacher I admire put it this way:
“As a student grows his writing voice, he will not always use the most accurate or sophisticated structure. Yet it is essential that he develop his voice first, without those restraints, so that he knows what it is to speak genuinely and with personal confidence. It is at this point that formats may be taught.”
Do formats restrain the writer’s voice?
When they are taught, however, initially some of that spark may fade. The writer’s voice might become submerged in the restrictions and specifics of the format. That is because the student is putting his energy into mastering a new way of writing and gives less attention to what he has to say specifically.
The writer who has a sense of her own writing voice, however, will eventually move through the awkward, stiff writing phase and reincorporate the personal, individual writing style as she becomes more comfortable with the purpose and structure of the format.
What this means is that you may introduce formats for writing to kids who write fluently and naturally. As you do, don’t be surprised at a bit of regression in terms of flair and personality in the writing. As the child begins to master the format (like the expository essay), look for ways to enhance the content by writing more sophisticated transitions, by including personal experience, by upgrading word choices and so on.
Developing your writing voice before using formats is essential for genuine, confident content.
Formats are the “next step” not the “first step” for your young writer.
Questions about writing formats come up frequently. Keep reading about things you can do to help strengthen your child’s writing voice before introducing formats.
Do You Ever Teach Writing Formats to Young Children?
The process of learning writing formats is very similar to how we learn to speak.
One of our BW moms asked me this week about teaching formats to her daughter who is now comfortable with writing. Does the Brave Writer philosophy eschew with formats all together? Is there ever a time to identify a topic sentence, to explain a descriptive paragraph, to teach the difference between argumentative and narrative paragraphs?
The answer is most assuredly, “Yes.”
Writing involves the use of formats as surely as speech does. We often follow unconscious formats as we speak. We greet each other according to conventions we learn along the way, we answer the phone and give directions according to formats we’ve internalized after years of talking and emulating other speakers. Eventually, some of us make an effort to learn how to give a speech or business presentation. We are trained to make a sales pitch or to close a deal.
All of these speech formats come long after we’ve internalized speaking as a primary means of communication.
With writing, it works the same way. As your child shows confidence and competence in freewriting, revision and editing, it is perfectly fine to discuss writing formats and to even “give them a whirl.” Most formats can be found on the Internet (descriptive, narrative, expository and argumentative paragraph instructions proliferate).
The tendency (for unconfident parents and not quite convinced writers) is to forget about writer’s voice, freedom, saying something that is meaningful rather than regurgitating what is expected, when faced with formats. My advice is to see formats as a new tool to help shape your child’s original quirky self into a recognizable format.
“Writing formats are a tool to help shape your child’s original quirky self into a recognizable format.”
In other words, if you are writing a poem, rhyme is a common feature of poetry. Putting your thoughts into meter and end rhyme is part of the fun of that writing style. Likewise, if the writer’s topic lends itself to description, then focus on sensory observations and organize the writing around a journey through the senses rather than falling into the temptation to narrate an event or to explain how to peel an orange (rather than describing it). A descriptive paragraph is a paragraph whose focus is description… that means that it needs to show me, rather than tell me.
A format in writing acts as a kind of container for the original thoughts and metaphors that the writer brings to the topic. My suggestion for brave writers, then, is that freewriting, exercises like the keen observation or musical language assignments ought to precede the attempt to write to a format. Get lots of ideas, images, words, thoughts out onto the page before imposing a format. Then, take the format and see how the ideas your writer has put forth can be organized to suit a specific format. Rearrange, embellish, adapt and shuffle until the writing is both an expression of a person and fits into the desired format.
While on a walk
Somehow my best educational conversations happen while walking the dog. My son, Liam (11), asked me if I would help him with spelling. This is how it went down:
“Why do you want help with spelling?”
“Because I want to be good at spelling.”
“I thought you were a good speller.”
“Well, not for all words. And plus I don’t know how to use semi-colons.”
“Oh, do you mean punctuation?”
“Yeah, that too.”
“Well for spelling and punctuation, copywork and dictation work best.”
“Well, I won’t do those.”
“Okay, how about we do a spelling bee while throwing a lacrosse ball?”
“Yeah, that would be great.”
“And for punctuation, we could do reverse dictation… how about that?”
“Oh that would be awesome.“
We got home and I started throwing the ball with him calling out words like “convenient” and “loquacious.” He needs no work on spelling, we discovered. 🙂 But he sure enjoyed the challenge!
Then that night, at about 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night, we began reverse dictation (a process by which I type up a passage from a book without any capitals or punctuation and he has to edit/correct the copy). Yes, this is how it works in my house – weekends, middle of the night kind of stuff.
We did two passages together from Harry Potter and he so enjoyed them, he is begging to do more. We covered more grammar and punctuation during his hour of real interest and enthusiasm than we have in the last four years of home education.
Finally I had to ask. “Why the sudden interest?”
“Well, my online gaming community did a recent survey and found out that only 49% of the users spell correctly most of the time. I want to start spelling right. And no one uses punctuation, but it seems like a good idea.”
And there you go. I swear this child’s entire education is coming from computer games. 🙂
Generating Insight in Writing
Quality writing depends on several key components such as surprise, beautiful language, sentence variety and distinct voice. Perhaps the most important ingredient in good writing, however, is insight. Insight is that intangible something that reveals a fresh perspective. Insight is the discovery of what you’ve always known for the first time.
The Power of Insight:
When we read a writer’s work and have that “Aha!” moment, we are experiencing the power of the writer’s insight. Insight is deeply rooted in experience and description (there are other features as well, but for this short blog post, let’s explore those two).
To get to a new perspective that resonates at a deep level, the writer has to start by telling the truth about his or her experience. This is a foreign experience for many people. We become so habituated to saying what is expected, to experiencing life through a set of preconceptions handed to us by family, culture, religion and national identity that the potential for truth-telling is blunted by expectation and conditioning. We are especially prone to unconsciously imposing those kinds of pressures on our kids so we have to explicitly give them permission to mess up our preconceptions as they explore topics for writing.
Brave Writers learn how to tell the truth of their new experiences.
I remember reading in one writing check list for revision that the writer should check her piece to be sure that all of the descriptions were edifying. If the writer is forced to make all descriptions rosy so as not to reveal chinks or blemishes, then the writer will not be able to dig honestly into her experience and thus bring forth truth. The writing will suffer and there will be no insight.
The Power of Curiosity:
To access experience, it helps to divest oneself of prejudgments. Start with reading widely or observing keenly. Let yourself ask questions, ponder comparisons and open yourself to new interpretations of the old data. Let your experience of the topic, scene or person deepen before writing. Take notes and allow for contradictions. “The criminal exhibits a kind manner toward animals.”
The second important aspect of gaining insight is the ability to describe thoroughly. Brave Writer offers several tools for accessing the ability to describe deeply both concrete items and concepts/ideas. When describing, you want to pay attention to the small details. In a familiar object, it might be the way the light catches the item or the blemish that you overlook when merely glancing. In describing an idea, you’ll want to look for the way that idea illuminates another related idea or the way it exposes a myth or stereotype, or even the way it reinforces that stereotype. You might look at it through the opposing viewpoint or pretending to agree where you disagree.
As you give yourself to hidden details of thought and perspective, you allow yourself to generate new experiences. These experiences lead to questions which will inevitably lead you to a fresh perspective. It is that perspective that I like to call insight!
Insight takes time to birth, but the labor leading up to it need not be painful. You merely need to take the time to be open to new possibilities, to comparisons and hidden meanings. Let your mind percolate, examine the idea/item multiple times, take notes and ask good questions. Then apply yourself to accurate (not necessarily edifying) description. As you do, you’ll generate insight.
Writing the Short Story: Brave Writer Online Class
Unlike our other fiction writing classes, the point of this one is to complete a story. You’ll take all that exploratory freewriting you’ve been doing and hone it until it reveals itself as a finished piece. If you have a long story or novel you’ve been developing, this is a great place to find its essence and travel a shorter narrative arc. Later, you can transfer what you’ve learned to your longer-form work.
Image by Chris, Flickr (cc Modified to add text.)
