Archive for the ‘Young Writers’ Category

Writers and Meltdowns: Better Coaching, Better Response

How to help young writers avoid meltdowns when it's time to revise their writing.

It’s possible to offer your young writer editorial feedback without triggering a meltdown!

From Hilary:

I was trying to coach my dd (10) on her first draft of an essay. We had talked about using her first draft (which she did on her own, without my prompting) as a base for a writing project, and she agreed.

As we went over it I commented on the good things I saw, the detail I liked, the flow of the essay, the excellent ending. Her topic was Helpful, Influential Genres (she agreed this was more accurate a title than Helpful, Influential Books). As I commented on the things that could be spruced up to be made more powerful, she really got defensive and closed up emotionally. I wanted her to choose a different word or a phrase for “helpful” in her essay, to fill out what that means.

Neither of my daughters likes to be corrected, even when I preface everything with things I liked and things that they did well. How do I help them understand that I want to help them grow as writers?  Is there a way to help them before they have a meltdown?

My response:

Meltdowns over editorial input are familiar to all writers. It takes time to let go of the ego investment long enough to recognize that someone’s input may actually help you write better than you realized you could.

As you rightly note, I like to start with what I like about a writer’s writing before I express ideas for improvement. So let me affirm you for doing what so many moms forget to do – that is, you found valuable ideas and detail, affirmed an excellent ending and applauded the flow of the piece. Thank you for being concrete and for making sure to do that.

Then you wanted to offer feedback for revision and this is where things got touchy. I have some principles and practices that may help.

First, kids need to know that they are the authors who have the final say over their writing. Just because you know that a change would enhance the piece doesn’t mean that it must be made. The writer must know that she is evaluating the input and making a judgment about it, not that she is victim to the changes a power figure requires her to make. See the difference? So offer the comment like this: “Hmmm. It seems to me that the word ‘helpful’ isn’t as clear as the rest of this title. What do you think?”

Or you might say, “Are you interested in hearing any feedback about the title? I have an idea that might make it pop to life, but want to be sure you are interested before I suggest it.”

By respecting her authority over her original writing, you give her the power which makes it easier for her to either hear you or to admit that she doesn’t want to hear you. In either case, you have a win-win. You develop trust. Eventually, when trust is built, she will want to hear you and perhaps over time, will even take your suggestions as welcome.

By respecting her authority over her original writing, you make it easier for her to hear you and to hear herself.

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Second, the positive feedback can’t be seen as “buttering up” before delivering the “real feedback” which will then be critical. Be specific (as you were) and leave some space between affirmation and constructive critique (like lunch or a couple of days). Let the positive have its impact before offering critique.

Third, remember that your feedback makes an impact even when she doesn’t take your advice. For instance, when you pointed out that the word “helpful” wasn’t that clear, she may choose not to make the change in this piece. However, you can bet that the next time she writes the word “helpful” she will remember that discussion about it and may at that time “self-edit” and choose a better word for the new paper.

Fourth, not every piece of writing needs to be improved. You can ask if this is one she wants to work on or if she is happy with it as is. If she appears to never want to revise a paper, you can suggest the following.

“Mary, let’s collect four of your papers and pick one to revise. You choose. Then I want you to share with me ways that you can improve it. If you need some ideas for how to revise, I can help. If you’re interested in my feedback about this particular piece, I’m here to help you too. Just let me know.”

This helps her to see that it’s important to revise and to learn to revise, but you leave her in control of when it happens, to which piece and how she will receive feedback.

Finally, don’t worry if it appears that she is resistant to feedback for a long time. It takes time to build trust between writer and editor. If she senses that you consistently are on her side, that you affirm what works well and that the feedback you offer is for her consideration, not as a command, she will come to trust you. If the feedback you give results in a wonderful change that makes the writing spring to life, she will then be likely to ask for your input the next time, rather than being suspicious of it.

Hope those help!

-Julie

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Breaking the Mold

Some writing assignments are like jello molds. They expect the writer to pour the hot liquid of her thoughts into a shape and then cool those thoughts down so that they congeal into a pineapple, celery and raspberry gelatin ring. (Can you believe that celery is ever added to jello?!)

Time to ditch the jello mold approach to writing.

Start with original, quirky thoughts. Get them on paper.

Dig through those words to find the most interesting hook – the part of the writing that caught your attention – and move it to the top. Don’t worry if it’s explicit or if it is a “topic sentence.” Grab the reader’s attention. You can use an exaggerated comparison (like I did at the top), you can start with dialog, you can describe noises or action, you can even lead with a question. But please, never begin a writing assignment with the birth date of a famous person, or the statistics of the Civil War, or the export percentages of lumber from Maine.

Get me into the topic through my curiosity or my emotions and then, as an IV drip keeps a person on life support fed, drip the facts into the writing. Don’t make facts and numbers the center piece of your writing. Let them add flavor and support to your otherwise wonderful retelling or description of the event, process or person in question.

Don’t mistake encyclopedia writing for a model of good writing. Encyclopedias are designed to meet certain criteria. That criteria doesn’t include entertaining, persuading or involving the reader. So leave encyclopedias on the shelf. Instead, use quality non-fiction (found in the juvenile section of your local library) as models for good non-fiction writing. Not all of these books achieve the goals I’ve stated here, but many of them do, particularly the ones written in the last five years.

Break free from the mold and write to impact. You’ll be glad your kids did.

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Avoiding Damage to Young Writers

Avoiding Damage to Young Writers

The premise of Brave Writer is that writing grows naturally in writers as they are allowed to develop a relationship to the page that represents their original thoughts, language, and ideas. This development will be as meandering as the development of speech, but it will show growth and development nonetheless.

What happens when natural development is
controlled through regulated programs, instead?

What happens when a parent believes that a child doesn’t yet have anything valuable to say and will only have something worth writing when he or she is much older and has absorbed the forms and thoughts of classical writers or those who are mature adult authors?

Let’s use the analogy to speech. If we required children to speak correctly, to use proper manners, to form complete sentences, to only speak once they were able to reproduce what they heard adults say, how much joy would that child take in speaking? Speech would become a source of anxiety and potential failure rather than a vehicle for communication.

When teaching writing, we need to be attentive to the messages we send based on the program we use. Imitation of classic writers is a noble goal. I like that Charlotte Mason suggests reading these writers each day, over time, with confidence that children can understand them and learn from them. E. B. White, the great American stylist, says that we would do well to sit in a parlor with the great writers of history in order to learn their syntax and usage, their style and wit. Since they are mostly dead, reading their writing will have to suffice.

Reading great writers is key to growth in writing.

Can we then go the next step and require or suggest imitation? And at what ages?

Avoiding Damage

Brave Writer offers a course called Just So Stories that uses the principles of imitation for the writing product that results. We read four of the stories, examine them for their literary elements and techniques and then each student writes her own “Just So Story” based on the model by Rudyard Kipling. The results are delightful. So I am not at all opposed to imitation per se.

What I want to emphasize, however, is that imitation is most fruitful in a child who has already experienced freedom in writing. It is more difficult to inject voice into a regimen of imitating than it is to inject imitation of specific literary techniques into a well-developed writer’s voice.

Brave Writer starts with the child and what he or she wants to say…

…but we have no problem offering tantalizing exercises that use classic writers for models. What I want to avoid is drudgery:

  • models that don’t inspire imitation,
  • models that are too advanced for a child’s particular developmental stage,
  • or the idea that models take precedence over the individual child’s developing writing voice.

Reading great writers is key to growth in writing.

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In other words, imitation ought to be a cheerful, natural time of word play – a chance to show off skills, to toy with language, to control the act of writing to approximate someone else’s style and wit. It ought not to be a time of drudgery where the student’s original writing voice is discredited, overridden, or judged as inferior to the model. It shouldn’t be a time of technical accuracy as much as joyful appropriation.

I like to call this kind of writing “stealing.” Steal the good stuff from those who are better at writing than you are. Hi-jack their literary elements and manipulate those elements so that they dress up your writing, not so that you relinquish control over your voice for the sake of sounding like someone else.

Let me give you an example of how this works:

Lots of kids know advertising syntax backwards and forwards. Give them a product, they’ll give you a jingle. If asked to write ad copy for a bicycle or a teddy bear, they can do it with alarming competence (no need to teach the elements of advertising – they know them from repeated exposure). What they express sounds like the ads you hear on radio or TV.

So if we want our kids to learn argument, we need to read, read, read argument. We explain how argument works, we deconstruct argument in the writings of great writers and we allow our kids to play with argument – perhaps starting with silly arguments they care about (why kids should not have to do chores, or why a child deserves to his own bedroom). The forms of expository writing (such as persuasive, compare and contrast, informative and so on) take time to absorb and are not appropriate for kids under 13 (in my humble opinion). Rhetorical thinking is developed in the teen years. Children under 13 can be expected to cite reasons for what they believe or feel, but that is not the same as argument (which requires an ability to nuance positions by evaluating sources and so forth).

Writing programs that marshal a child’s writing efforts into preconceived writing formats at a young age stifle the important development of writer’s voice and can ironically strip a child of joy in the process.

The ownership of the writing product is inadvertently stolen from the writer and is instead assigned to the model. Children learn then that writing is not about what they want to say, but guessing and working hard to figure out what they are supposed to say.

Over time, this experience can become tedious and even painful. Some children lose heart completely. I’ve taught many students who have come to me as teens who have never known that writing is related to them and their ideas in any way. It is a shock to their systems to realize that I am interested in their thoughts in their own words. And that moment is usually the beginning of recovery of voice.

Click to read more about Brave Writer and Classical Writing and the development process towards Academic Writing.

Brave Writer Online Writing Class Just So Stories

Just So Stories is an excellent class to take after The Writer’s Jungle Online or once you’ve worked through The Writer’s Jungle (though neither is required).

Brave Writer techniques such as list-making, freewriting, revision strategies and editing are all used in this new context of story-writing.

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Brave Writer and Academic Writing

Recipe for a Brave Writer

What is the goal of Brave Writer?

My favorite kind of writing is academic writing. I love the strict nature of the structure, the importance of the positions being argued and the power of doing it well enough to persuade or change a reader. So if you are under the misimpression that academic writing is not the goal of Brave Writer, I want to correct that now. It is my goal for all my students. But it is not the primary goal.

Let’s look at the foundation of what writing really ought to be.

Writing is about writers, first. It is about identifying what you want to say and then finding the right vehicle for saying it. So the question is: how do we get there? And that’s where programs offer you a variety of philosophies to consider. Let’s look at Brave Writer and see how it helps your writers do just that.

Brave Writer is not primarily about teaching kids to be creative (as in writing silly stories or personal anecdotes or fiction). It is not a program that is designed for those who want to avoid doing the hard work of writing instruction. Rather, Brave Writer promotes a lifestyle (habit) and a practice (discipline) that leads to effective, original, thoughtful writing that sounds like the writer and reflects the original and unique contribution that writer wants to make to the topic.

Classical writing programs often begin with the imitation of great writers and a practice that focuses on getting it right – right format, right style, right grammar, right mechanics, right argument structure, right ideas, right discipline. The goal (to have an intelligent, competent writer by college) is the same one I have for my kids and my students. It’s just that we get there differently.

Brave Writer and Academic Writing

Brave Writer begins with the writer.

Brave Writer doesn’t start with imitation or with the topic of writing at all. It starts with a person – the writer. Let me show you how it’s done by comparing it to another process you know well: speaking.

Speak up!

When your kids were less than a year old, you talked with them all the time, even though they couldn’t talk back. Some time around a year to 18 mos, your little darling uttered her first word. In my family, our son Noah pointed and said “Nana” indicating that he wanted a banana. I immediately shrieked “Jon, get here quick. Noah is brilliant!” I then coaxed Noah to say “nana” again so that Jon would see how good his genes were. After handing Noah the banana he wanted, I ran to the baby book and wrote down the date and the word “nana.”

Here is what I did not do. I did not panic and think: “Oh no. He said nana not banana. I wonder if he’ll ever learn the right word.” I didn’t stop him and say, “Now you know, Noah, the word is banana and it is a noun. You must use it in a sentence like this. If you use it correctly, I will give you a banana.”

Rather, for the next five years, our lives were filled with speaking opportunities. We talked with him every day, we giggled over his mispronunciations and put them in the baby book, we helped him when he got stuck and couldn’t think of a word, we listened to his rambling stories and experiences waiting for him to find vocabulary or sort out the details.

At age five, when his fluency kicked in, we did not suddenly impose structures on his speech. He didn’t have to give public addresses, act in plays, enter debates or make presentations. He was free to enjoy talking, all while we slowly introduced him to varieties of ways talking could be used. Over the next twelve years, Noah learned the following speech formats: how to chat on the phone, how to meet and greet people, how to host a party, how to act (he has done both Shakespeare and contemporary plays), how to give an oral report, he learned to recite and perform poetry and speeches, he discovered and excelled at improvisational acting, he taught others how to use computers, and he made presentations.

He could not learn these “formats” while he was still learning to become fluent in speaking. These uses of speech came after he had been sufficiently saturated in spoken language in a loving and supportive environment for years. We introduced spoken formats over time, with increasing difficulty as they became relevant to his life and capabilities.

Write it out!

So let’s compare this now to writing. Did you, the first time your child misspelled a word, run to the baby book and jot down how cute it was to read “becuaz” instead of “because”? Did you delight in the fact that your daughter wrote an entire page of invented phonics to tell a story that you couldn’t read but that she could?

Probably not. There is something in us that says when it is written, it must be perfect. But let’s think about this for a moment. When does writing ever get to be about the joy of self-expression aimed at a reader? What if we focused on that written self-expression for about, say, four or five years? We could start at age 7 or 8, and let them narrate while we jot things down for them. We could watch them transition to writing some of it themselves (in all its glorious inaccuracy and fumbled attempts at punctuation) while they are 9-10… maybe even 11.

At the same time, we immerse them in language. We read, we copy, we dictate passages to transcribe. We watch Shakespeare and read Chaucer. We recite poetry and we tell jokes. We watch sitcoms and movies. We write down what they think of all these things. Or they write it. Or we do it together, modeling how to access that language that is growing inside. We show how to put in periods and commas, how to figure out spellings when not sure, how to use Spell and Grammar Check, how to revise our work so that it is better than it was on the first pass, how to upgrade word choices and images to convey meaning. We do all of these things, together, at the table as we make time for it.

Brave Writer nurtures the joy of self-expression aimed at a reader.

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By about age 13, then, your writer will likely be fluent at written self-expression. He or she will feel comfortable on the page – it will be a true reflection of that person’s voice and insights, ideas and thoughts, images, and metaphors. These will be growing naturally in your writer over all those years together writing, reading, and talking.

When you hit those high school years, then, it is time for formats and that’s when we move out of the more freewheeling style of writing and learn how to discipline it to satisfy the demands of an academic community. Let me tell you – kids who have been active online (writing) and who grow up in the Brave Writer style of language arts development make this transition seamlessly. They are my best writers, bar none. They may not always be the best mechanically (at first). But they have so much to say, so many words to draw on, so many ideas and insights… and they brim with confidence.

Kids who come to me who have been “well-taught” (grammar, mechanics, formats) often can put together good copy (as in following the structural directions), but there is little imagination. I don’t mean imagination as in fiction. I mean the ability to think and reason creatively, persuasively, with insight.

The other bug-a-boo is that a regimented program often dulls the child’s natural writing voice and interest in writing. As long as writing is external to the child’s inner life (is about fulfilling requirements for someone else), the writer suffers.

If you’re looking at classical education for you homeschool,
click to keep reading about Brave Writer and Classical Writing.

Top image by Liz West, Flickr (cc Modified to add text.)

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Brave Writer and Classical Education

Classical education and the Brave Writer Lifestyle

Adults can be drawn to the classical education model. We see what we haven’t learned and are in awe of the opportunity to learn it now, with our kids, hoping they will be the intellectual competents that we fear we are not.

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With the rise of The Well-Trained Mind, homeschoolers are now aware of significant gaps in their own educations. Most of us don’t remember learning the Greek myths, haven’t read The Illiad or The Odyssey, remember very little of our western civ coursework from college, and feel that any expository writing we did in college was more of a lick and a prayer than serious argument.

So we’re attracted to classical homeschooling. There’s so much to love about it!

Love the four year history rotation, love the integration of the sciences into history, love reading classical literature, love the classical argument models, love the immersion in myth and legend and tale and epic poem that is classical education.

Kids deserve to be expanded by

  • great literature,
  • myth,
  • epic poetry,
  • legend,
  • artwork,
  • history,
  • scientific discovery,
  • the stars,
  • mathematics as a language (not just as a workbook),
  • Shakespeare,
  • theater,
  • music,
  • dance,
  • and languages.

These sources provide rich material for imagination, vocabulary, and inner life. Such inner lives naturally spill over into writing with content and texture.

Each stage of development (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) offers new levels of personal expression and connection to these living source materials. Conversations, drawings, written narrations, transcription of great writing, mini dramas acted out, imitation, and metaphorical thinking (where one connects the past to present experience in a meaningful way) all give the ideas dimension and relevance to the student.

Brave Writer and Classical Homeschooling

Can classical methods and Brave Writer mix? Yes!

So how does Brave Writer fit into this style of education? I love to say that joy is the best teacher. A happy mother makes a better home educator. The happiness must come from within, not from compliant children. So we begin with you. Begin the adventure of a classical education because you want one, not because your children should have one. You’ll need staying power to carry this course through. Your enjoyment of the lifestyle of classical education must be the fuel in your homeschool engine.

If a classical education model is what excites you, live it first, in front of your children. Read the classics (alone first, or a children’s version aloud). Get some commentaries to help you. You might start with Greek myths (they are so captivating and prevalent, and you will find lots of reinforcement in art and literature).

If you are new to epic poetry, pick out something like Beowulf, narrated by Seamus Heaney on CD and play it over breakfast, a little bit each day. Listen to the story and draw pictures of Grendel. Keep a little lexicon of terms that you define as you discover them. Play with them in sentences over breakfast when your listening is done.

If your kids are writers (9-10 or older), you can use a Friday Freewrite to write what you think will happen next, or to write a new ending, or to think about what Grendel may have felt in those last moments. (For those who don’t know, there is a book called Grendel that was written just for that purpose. You might check that out and compare it to your own speculations.)

You might write a new myth or create a Greek god (what god do you think the Greeks lacked and why?). Reinforce what you are learning not just through rote repetition, but using your imagination to make connections to our time, to our understandings.

Certainly any child who plays online games will make scores of connections since these games are rife with references to the ancient world in particular. Look up the names of characters and discover a pantheon of Egyptian and Phoenician gods that are hidden within the games.

Narration is key to a classical education because the ideas are unfamiliar and the vocabulary is often challenging. So talk over tea and in the car and over dinner. Take your time and keep the experience relevant to kids (don’t rely only on your sense that the material is important to “get them” to do their work). Our family spent two years solid on Ancient Greece, with our major concentration on Greek mythology. My kids know their myths backwards and forwards because they love them, not because they had to learn them.

Eventually this immersion in myths led to a fascination with epic poems, such as Gilgamesh. The results in our home: My daughter wrote her own Greek myth modeled after the ones she loved and my son wrote a screenplay for the story of Gilgamesh. These were not assignments, but spilled out of long term incubation and saturation with the material.

Want more on this theme? Our Writing a Greek Myth class is one of our most popular!

Brave Writer online class: Writing a Greek Myth
Image by Carnaval.com Studios (cc Modified to add text.)

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