Writing online should be a big part of educating your kids

Writing is a powerful skill, but hard to teach without great expense. Until now.

Traditional schools are failing children by not teaching them to write.

There is no difference between writing and thinking. 

When you write, you can organize more ideas than you can remember at once. Once you see everything in the same place, you can take the best ideas and edit them down to gold. Those become the blueprints for a good life. That’s why people journal. 

Further, studies show that writing actually changes the structure of your brain. Taking the time to write things down, even things you think you “know,” actually helps turn you into the person you’d like to be. 

Being able to marshal an argument succinctly makes anybody more successful–no matter what field they work in. If a cook, for example, can write and think properly, he can not only keep his emotional life in check (a big part of keeping any job) but can also negotiate for a raise and write a convincing resume to keep his options open. 

Not teaching kids to write is like sending a gladiator into the ring without a sword.

Traditional schools are badly equipped to teach writing for two main reasons: 

1. They focus on writing to an outdated template of what constitutes “good.” Nobody should write the way most were taught to write in school. 

2. And, even if kids have good teachers, those teachers simply don’t have the time and energy to make bad writers into good writers (it takes a lot of editing and a lot of time). 

If we want our kids to be powerful, we need to train them to be warriors of words. The best place to do that is the battleground. 

Help your kids publish their words online. Help them understand and incorporate feedback (by the way, lack of attention is feedback). 

Help them become powerful people. Let them write. 

Most subjects don’t require one-on-one teachers anymore

If you want to learn math, you can practice online. You can read forums. There is a clear right and wrong answer, so you and your kids can figure a lot out on your own. 

However, writing is an entirely different sort of beast. 

To become a good writer, you need personal feedback—a lot of it. 

Unless you’re already a good writer, you won’t likely get much feedback because no one wants to read a beginner’s writing (for free, anyway). A lot can go wrong: the words might be awkward, the sentence structure might be weak, the sentences might be in the wrong order, the paragraphs might not tie together, etc. It takes an enormous amount of labor by both teacher and student to get a new writer from bad to good. Not many people will bother.

Some kids are lucky to have a writing mentor who will take them under her wing and show them, step by step, how to improve their writing. But what if you don’t have access to that?

What if we could outsource that labor? 

Thanks to the internet, we can. 

How to outsource writing feedback

Say your kid is interested in insects. Have them start a blog. 

This is what we love about writing online: by allowing the entire internet to “judge” a kid’s writing (and not just a single, overworked teacher) it shows them that good writing is not necessarily about getting all the grammar right. Good writing is about writing from a place of honest motivation. Readers can tell the difference. Their clicks and attention prove it. When a kid can write about something they love, they naturally work hard to convey what they want to say. Even if it’s not perfect, people respond to honesty. 

Traditional schools get this totally backward. They teach the grammar and the structure first, and completely leave out motivation about why the kid would write in the first place. 

Kids should learn that writing is a powerful method of communication. Communication is key to a fulfilling life. Being good at communication is the same as being good at thinking. Grammar is merely a tool to think more effectively. If kids learn writing skills in that order, they see it as extremely useful and fun—not an annoying thing they have to get “right.”

By writing online, kids are motivated to write in a clear way so that other people who share their interests can understand. Over time, they will naturally learn rules, syntax, and style. Just think of how hard it is to learn a foreign language when focused on grammar. Fluency (in writing) will develop naturally and through passion–readers are starving for that. Don’t be surprised if your kid gains a readership (although that shouldn’t be the only goal). 

Help your kid to notice what writing people respond to and what people ignore. Encourage them to develop themselves as writers. Notice that they learn to balance what they want to say and what an audience wants to hear. That’s the never-ending struggle of the writer. 

Here are a few ways your could start together today: 

Start a blog. A blog is a great place to learn to write. Help them set goals around the blog that matter to them (not necessarily to you). Help them recover from setbacks. Celebrate their wins.

Open a Twitter account about a niche topic. A great way to stay anonymous is to start a Twitter about a topic the kid loves. Have them run the account. Discuss goals. 

Write an email to someone they admire. Kids, like all of us, admire people. Help them craft an email to someone they love. Ask them what they want to say and how they want to say it. Send it and see if you receive a response.

Enter online writing competitions. Some kids are very motivated by competition, which allows them the opportunity to show off their skills. There are fiction writing competitions, non-fiction, and persuasive writing, too. 

Teaching kids to write is very expensive. Luckily, we can use the internet to outsource almost all costs. 

Taking advantage of that opportunity can have an enormous benefit in making your kid a better writer—and a better thinker.

If you know parents who don’t have time to teach their kids to write, send them this.

If you’re that parent, subscribe for much more like this in your inbox every Tuesday.

Thank you for reading,

Taylor + rebelEducator team

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P.S.

Here’s what we’re looking at:

This tweet on 8 ways to raise more resilient kids

This article about using inquiry to make students naturally more curious

How much struggle is the right amount for a kid’s education? Here’s an article that tries to answer that.

Bonus: This chart on how kids actually learn.

Quotes we’re pondering:

"The only way to make learning truly relevant to each student is to teach the tools and strategies they will need to take a more active role in their learning." — Nina Parrish

“Don't let schooling interfere with your education” — Mark Twain

“What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch out of a meandering brook.” — Henry David Thoreau