Writing at Home
Adolescents are developing a sense of personal identity. Teen writing becomes more poignant, often directly relating to their lives regardless of the assigned topic. Consider the following example, written by a seventeen-year-old boy when asked to write about summer:
“Crew leader responsibilities stretched me into a person that has no limits.”
“After days removed from civilization, I was bound to the land. When I stood on the top of Mount Baldy and looked out over miles of endless country - it was hard for me to believe people could see such vast landscape - and still say there is no God.”
Peter
High School Junior
As teen writing becomes more personal, it also becomes riskier for an adolescent to share their writing, particularly with a parent.
Creating an environment where the parent becomes the writing coach, instructing through mini-lessons while respecting the privacy and vulnerability of the student will go a long way to encourage more writing. Allowing the student to keep some writing private will foster the transitioning relationship parents and teens experience in the teen years. Further tips on how to manage this issue are included in the Writer’s Notebook section of Write Next To Me.
Importance of Choice in Writing
Because of this natural tendency to focus inward, allowing choice in topics is very important in the teen years.
In Teaching Adolescent Writers, author Kelly Gallagher sites two benefits in allowing choice in writing topics: “choice offers a feeling of ownership in the writer and choice drive better revision.” When a student cares about the writing and the topic, they are much more likely to begin working on a paper, continue to work on it diligently, and revise their work.
Classroom teachers often must work within requirements mandated by districts; however, parents writing with their students at home have greater flexibility in deciding what to write. All students, but especially adolescent writers, should be exposed to writing for real life reasons: business letters, emails, requests for information, directions, steps for completing a job, reports, letters to the editor of a newspaper, etc. Adolescents should be familiar with writing for specific purposes and have ample practice writing, revising and editing informative, narrative, and argument pieces.
Writing Across the Curriculum
The teen writer should be writing in every subject, producing an abundance of writing weekly.
Most of this writing will fall under the category of writing to learn, will not be revised or edited, but aid the student in learning content area of his or her academic subjects. The University of Richmond Writing Center has compiled a list of writing to learn activities and directions for their use. Homeschool parents have an amazing opportunity to move beyond fill in the blank workbook exercises and incorporate writing into every school day and every subject. By becoming familiar with writing to learn strategies, parents will be prepared to move beyond their homeschool curriculum.
