My 7th grade son has his first essay to write. I wish to guide him while keeping his work his own original material. Yet, I cannot let him submit just anything, either. So, how does one coach writing when the child is on that maiden voyage across the blank paper? (Note: He did write a first draft which, in a general sense, has some merit. But, it needs work to organize his thoughts.)
Beyond writing an outline (which he lacks), what other pointers and tricks do you have to help the student construct a semi-coherent product? Thanks!
First off,* why* can’t you let him submit just anything? Has he asked for your help? Does he have a learning disability that requires your help? Sometimes, letting him make his own mistakes works better than editing him to death.
Other than that, I’d coach him to make an outline and stick to it, and give it a good proofreading for grammar and spelling.
I have no idea what kind of natural writing talent your son has, but I will advise as best I can. First of all, he should have written essays before 7th grade, so I’m kind of surprised he’s in this situation.
If you are unsure of how to advise, I would start with emphasizing the basics of writing. He needs to indent, use proper punctuation, and learn to use a voice that is appropriate in tone to the audience he is writing for(his school).
Is this a prompt essay? A personal narrative? A persuasive essay? Research or something?
If it is a standard 5-paragraph prompt essay(state testing style), I would recommend he work on having a brief intro, three paragraphs in the body that explain his thought or analysis, and a conclusion to wrap things up.
A major emphasis today in writing for testing is that students learn to cite sources they have been given to read. Again, it depends on the essay type.
I’m willing to look at your son’s writing and tell both of you what I would say if you want. You can type these things on Gdrive and set them to view or edit for people. If you want to send it to me or give me access, you can PM me and I’ll provide an email to share things with.
Or you can just ask on here and give more specific details about his assignment.
College English professor here. Yes, for heaven’s sake let him make his own mistakes. Seventh-grade essays are not supposed to be good, and I pretty much guarantee your kid’s teacher is not expecting them to be good. The point is trying stuff out, learning what works and doesn’t work, and then doing it over and over again, until you’ve practiced enough to improve your skills. When parents jump in and try to make everything well-written by adult standards, they short-circuit that process and also teach their kids to feel helpless.
You can certainly give him feedback from an audience’s perspective (“I don’t understand the connection between this idea and that one”), but let him figure out what to do with it. The usual rule in college writing centers, which I think is a good one, is that the student who wrote the essay is always the one holding the pen. You can also suggest strategies that he might not have thought of yet, like having an outline or reading the draft out loud to himself, but again, let him be the one to decide whether and how to apply them.
I’m going to third the “let him make his own mistakes” advice. Both as a parent to girls with learning disabilities and now as a para assisting students with learning disabilities, I’ve learned that at some point you’re going to have to just watch helplessly as they turn in work that you know has errors. But they won’t learn if you intervene too much.
here’s a suggestion: tell him to read his essay out loud. Record it* , and then play it back.
He can, and should, do this by himself…so he won’t feel pressured or embarrassed.
Nobody else should hear it, just him. Let him decide—Does it make sense?
Tell him to imagine that what he just heard on playback was his side of a conversation with a friend. Does the friend understand the point? Does the essay make sense?Does it follow logically from one paragraph to the next? Does it offer a point of view to agree or disagree with? etc.
Ask him to think about how his friend would answer the essay. Maybe even write a quick couple of sentences describing what the friend would say in response.
*Easy to do these days, with your phone. Back in my day, you had to rig up a tape recorder with a microphone.
American academic writing – at the basic level – tends to follow the pattern: “here’s what I’ll talk about – talk about it – here’s what I just said.”
You do that within a paragraph (intro and concluding sentences), and you do that within an essay, too (intro and concluding paragraphs).
I think it might be helpful to point this convention out for someone who hasn’t absorbed it already – and to talk about why it makes sense. (And also to acknowledge that it’s a formula for boring writing.)
Another call to see the actual assignment. Teachers generally focus on one or two skills at a time–so is the teacher looking for organization, coming up with good examples, grammar, voice, thesis, elaboration?
There’s no quicker way to turn a young writer off than to jump on literally every aspect of the paper, attacking the literal infinite number of things that could be better. What’s the focus?
I’ve been scoring standardized test essays since 2001, so I’ve read thousands of them. If the essay asks the student to take a position on an issue, then take a position and don’t argue both sides. Acknowledge the other side, but explain why you believe they’re wrong.
Regardless of what mode they’re writing in, too much dialogue in an essay is a sign of a weak writer as well as long lists. Everyone can see when a student is trying to just meet a word count.
I was, an am, a poor essay writer. I managed to complete very few essays, partly because I knew that what I was writing sucked.
It would have been a lot easier for me, personally, if I had been given some examples of what I was supposed to be trying to do. It also might have been good for me if I had been given a point-by-point comparison.
To be honest, I’ve developed an aversion to ‘self-directed’ and ‘project’ study. I still remember getting a laboratory report marked ‘tick, tick, thick, tick, 5 out of 10’. WTF was I supposed to learn from that? And being told that my engineering graphics weren’t any good, that I would be taught better: like hell they did: practising making the same mistakes is not teaching.
An ESL teacher (English as a second language,although I’m more accurately an English as a foreigner language teacher) checking in.
I also recommend clarifying what the assignment is and checking to see what the focus is.
For general advice on organizing ideas for essays, mind maps are quite useful. It can be fine either before the first draft or after. Since he has a first draft, then a mind map can help show the relation between the ideas.
In my experience this will work if he already has internalized the expectations of written academic discourse–which is not conversational–to the degree that he can “hear” them, but he hasn’t, because he’s totally new to academic writing. No matter how good or bad it is, it will sound “right” to him, because he’s the one who wrote it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have written it that way.
Learning to write is essentially a process of socialization, which requires the external influence of some kind of agent which already has come to embody the conventions of that socialization.
So what he needs is to read–in a truly engaged way–a lot of model essays that are exactly of the same scope and purpose as the one he is being asked to write. Not just one model, but many. That’s really how most people pick up the ability to produce acceptable academic writing. Explicit explanation–i.e, telling students how to write–is of very limited effect, compared to ***showing ***them how to write.
One would hope this has already happened in his class, but traditionally that has not been the case. For a long time the custom was to give students fictional stories to read, and then turn around and ask them to write an essay–something completely different. Then the teachers would complain that their students can’t write something which they’ve barely even seen before.
For many students, yes, mind mapping is very helpful, but I often see very bright students for whom the cognitive leap from the diagram to the block of prose just doesn’t click.
It seems to be culturally bound, and I think often what may seem transparent and self-evident to the instructor with many of these techniques is very much a product of certain discursive traditions which are developed only in certain types of schooling, and which are not universal or meaningful to all learners. There are some techniques, I believe, which really only work for students who actually already know what to do, so in way, they’re not helping anyone. (Sentence diagramming is probably the most egregious example of this, on the sentence level.)