Arguably, one of the most important gifts you can give your child as a parent is helping them to cultivate a skill that will benefit them throughout their youth and into adulthood: strong essay writing. Good writing will help kids do well in school and fuel strong communication and critical thinking skills. Parents can make a real difference, whether a preschooler is just starting to form sentences or a high school student with upcoming college applications. Here, you’ll find some helpful tips and strategies for parents interested in helping their child improve their writing skills.
Understand the Basics Together
First, do it together. You should know the basics of writing an essay: discuss the different kinds, such as persuasive, narrative, and expository, and how each essay has its particular form and function. Review different essay prompts and identify what they ask for and how you might answer them. Finally, brainstorm approaches to help you understand the task and boost your critical-thinking skills.
Though your guidance in the essay-writing process through rounds of practice and feedback remains invaluable, there are occasions when outside help might be needed. The Top Essay Writing company can prove helpful with its ability to provide professional feedback on your child’s writing, present good examples, and explain complex concepts, among other things. The savvy use of these services can show your child practical applications of writing standards and potentially spark interest through exposure to high-quality writing.
Foster a Reading Habit
Good writers are good readers first; reading is the cornerstone if you want to develop as a writer. To help ensure that your reading habits lay a solid foundation for your writing, keep the following four points in mind:
- Vary reading material: Encourage your child to read everything from classic novels to up-to-date newspapers and thought-provoking magazines. The more varied the reading material, the more likely your child will be able to digest and understand it.
- Build your lexis: Reading introduces words and phrases you will never otherwise encounter. A rich lexis is essential for all writers, helping them make their thoughts more precise and forceful.
- Read the text aloud: When reading a book or article aloud to your child, slow down and share your thinking about why an author might have made a particular choice. Investigating this allows kids to look inside the text and grasp how writers build an argument. Developing a “writer’s voice” in your child prepares them for the rhetorical world they’ll inhabit.
- Apply learned techniques: If you read this text and see the author making an excellent argument, how might you construct arguments in your material? Or if you read this text and think that the way the author has the characters speak is dynamic and exciting, how might you take what you notice in the text and make it work in your writing? Practical applications embed these techniques in your child’s mind.
Incorporating these techniques into your child’s reading routine will help them become more effective writers. It will, in turn, boost their academic performance and ability to communicate effectively as adults.
Practice Regularly
As with learning any skill, regular practice will see improvement. Ensure your child writes daily, whether it’s a journal entry, a recap of what they learned in school that day, or a short essay. And be sure to give feedback. Focus on praise for strengths and correction for one or two areas they are trying to work on at a time – not too much correction all at once. This “targeted feedback” rather than the “spray and pray” approach is more manageable and meaningful for your child. That way, the learning process will be more enjoyable and productive. Your child will be well on their way to mastery and gain the confidence and experience they need to be successful writers.
Use Technology Wisely
There are many online writing and grammar resources to help with your child’s writing and grammar, including writing workbooks, grammar apps, online editing tools, and creative writing prompts. Grammar apps provide a stealthy and fun route to learning language rules. These apps offer interactive, hands-on learning with immediate feedback on answers at the child’s own pace. They create an engaged and collaborative “learning as play” environment.
Writing workbooks provide a writing prompt followed by an exercise. Exercises flow from basic sentences to simple paragraphs to longer paragraphs to essays, with incremental skills development, providing extensive practice. They can teach paragraph and essay writing strategies, which help students form a coherent overall picture of a piece of writing. They can also improve their grammatical skills, such as punctuation and sentence structure.
Online editing tools, such as the Hemingway Editor app, can identify areas that need improvement in a student’s writing, highlighting verboseness, passive voice structures, redundancy, etc. They can “teach” students how to revise a piece of writing and self-edit. Creative writing prompts from emerging websites and apps can inspire the next Hemingway or Faulkner. The prompts help students write stories and essays on various topics and styles. They can provide examples for their writing. Using digital tools can increase writing proficiency and enjoyment, providing a much-needed digital spark for kids’ writing productivity while fostering a lifelong passion for writing.
Building Confidence, One Word at a Time
Improving essay writing skills is a process that builds upon itself. Ensure you’re patient with your child and clap at little victories to stay motivated. Your child will benefit from developing an upbeat attitude toward the writing process, seeing challenges as opportunities for growth, and learning to stay positive about the entire writing experience. As you guide your child through the tools for writing an essay, they learn valuable steps to becoming an essay writer and harnessing words as a powerful source of self-expression.