<p>^ With all due respect, it has been my experience that one of the very worst things a high school kid can do for their writing is to enroll in a creative writing course.</p>
<p>My son took a creative writing course in high school. He loved it and I think he learned a lot.</p>
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Unlike my posts. ;)</p>
<p>Fiction: Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ian McEwan, Nick Hornby, Harlan Coben
Non-fiction: John McPhee
For fiction, non-fiction, essays: John Updike</p>
<p>For sheer ingenuity with the English language, VOX by Nicholson Baker</p>
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<p>Writing down the bones: freeing the writer within by Natalie Goldberg
Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott</p>
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<p>Read. Stop. Think.
Write. Think. Rewrite.
Repeat.</p>
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<p>Interesting. I’ll have to check out that edition.</p>
<p>Many high schools have a creative writing course, or at least a section of it within Honors English. It teaches kids the important choices made by authors about word choice, sentence choice, or why they started a new paragraph. In a short story, a character choosing to close a door or leave it ajar is an essential part of the plot - in a novel, not so much.</p>
<p>Once a kid starts to read critically, recognizing the style, language, cadence, character development, and foreshadowing, he can start to take parts of his reading and use it to develop his own stylistic voice.</p>
<p>You won’t be a good boxer by watching Mike Tyson on tv, and you won’t learn to write solely by reading.</p>
<p>Just read a lot and read widely. I really believe that the decline in writing ability we see in even elite college students is down to the fact that they don’t read much, ever. They are too busy. Our culture does not value reflection.</p>
<p>Another unfortunate thing is that students are reading textbooks through high school and often through college. As a professor, I make my students read the original sources–no textbooks. And when we were visiting colleges with my D, I would take a look in the bookstore to see what the professors there were assigning. Her current school got many points on my scorecard when I realized that a lot of the professors there have the same approach–no Introduction to Psychology, for example, but instead books by Freud, Jung, Piaget, etc.</p>
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<p>Concur, assuming that “widely” means books, articles, etc. on varied subject matter.</p>
<p>In terms of specific books to read, beware of taking our our advice–that is, the advice of people in their 40s, 50s, and older. Styles and tastes change, and what we liked may not be very appealing today. Some books may not be as interesting or readable as we remember them. Don’t be afraid to stop reading a book if you find the style impenetrable, or very slow going. Your goal is to read a lot, not to conquer tough books.</p>
<p>Case in point: I remember “Last of the Mohicans” as being a good book. But if you pick up a Cooper novel now, you’ll probably find it painfully dense.</p>
<p>That’s so true Hunt! I loved Last of the Mohicans too! 
Great story though and I adore Dickens and his convoluted plots. But…My DIL loves Perks of Being a Wallflower and met the author and passed a copy to me. I am reading it and should have finished “years” ago but I put it down to work on another more convoluted tale. Newer stories are less dense.</p>
<p>I used to bang my head against the wall, wondering how one of my ds, an avid reader, could possibly write that poorly. She wasn’t reading the classics other than Louisa May Alcott, but the authors she liked were good ones: Stephen King was a favorite (can’t recall the others now). She read LOTR early, and revisited Harry Potter every year. Somehow the clarity and mechanical mastery in the books she enjoyed did not set an example she could follow.</p>
<p>Three things helped. She had a marvelous high school English teacher who handed back every writing assignment for another draft, with each grammatical error underlined with a reminder of the applicable rule. This teacher held the kids to a very high standard for both analysis and mechanics. She was a treasure who turned my careless writer into a pretty good one.</p>
<p>Earlier, d took a creative writing class that concentrated on poetry and brief personal essays. The teacher encouraged my d to see herself as a writer, and created opportunities to employ a higher level of vocabulary - words my d understood, but seldom used in writing before this class. She also encouraged a love of poetry, which made my d aware of the subtleties and power of word choice. </p>
<p>Finally, my d used a hint one of her older sisters received from a college writing instructor: read the first draft out loud. It’s a great way to find grammatical errors, repetitions, incomplete thoughts, etc.</p>
<p>I’d agree that the best way for a kid to become a competent writer is to read widely. But for my d, teachers made the difference. Another of my ds was an accomplished writer from an early age. Even though she often read dreck (remember the Babysitters Club and the Sweet Valley Twins?), she was always writing her own short stories and scribbling in a journal.</p>
<p>I agree that writing a lot helps too. Teachers who require rewriting are gems. The best teacher my older son had made his students rewrite papers at least two or three times. Students who want to write better should write more. Reading out loud helps, and so does having an editor.</p>
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<p>I may be mistaken about this, but my guess is that you are identifying a teacher who, currently, is one in a thousand. Maybe one in a hundred, but not much more frequently encountered. Good for your daughter.</p>
<p>Rewriting is a good practice. Unfortunately, it requires the original effort to have been completed timely enough to allow for some rewriting. That is not something that I was particularly good at in my youth.</p>
<p>Classof2015, I like your list of authors. </p>
<p>Really, I don’t think it’s so much grammar and style so much as clarity, reasoning, organization. That’s what’re really hard to teach. And it’s so valuable for kids to learn because it actually, in my view, helps them learn to think.</p>
<p>I know the theory goes that turning kids on to creative writing gets them excited about writing, etc. I think it can actually impede their mastery of what goes into writing a clear, well organized, well reasoned and well supported essay. So few kids arrive at college able to do that. But a lot arrive at college convinced they are the next great novelist or poet.</p>
<p>And yes, absolutely – a truly excellent English teacher is very rare and very, very valuable. My older one never had one in high school. He would easily get A’s on papers but when he’d show his writing to us, my DH and I would scratch our heads and diplomatically point out the weaknesses. At college he encountered very high standards and had to learn to meet them.</p>
<p>My younger one had one outstanding English teacher in the 9th grade. Most of the class was in an uproar. A number of parents of kids in the class were in an uproar because their “straight-A kids were getting B’s on papers!!” We were thrilled. That is the year our younger one learned to write a paper. Such a blessing for her to learn that early.</p>
<p>dadx,</p>
<p>I agree that such teachers are rare. My teachers seldom pointed out grammatical or stylistic issues, unless they were egregious.</p>
<p>You know, I had several outstanding English teachers in high school, and so expected my kids would as well. And they did! Perhaps ours is an especially fortunate/well-run high school. Each of my 3 girls had marvelous teachers, especially at the AP level. When I’d see their comments on returned papers, or look through unit materials, I’d marvel at the time and effort these teachers lavished on their students.</p>
<p>Although I understand the point that creative writing classes may not prepare students to write well-structured papers, what the class did for my own d was make her comfortable using a higher level of vocabulary in her writing. I don’t think anything could ever have made her think she was the next great creative writer, though.</p>
<p>This is the kid whose 2nd grade teacher tried explaining writing a paragraph by saying that it was like a sandwich - the introductory sentence and the concluding sentence are the slices of bread, and the sentences in between are the ingredients. She raised her hand and said, “I don’t like writing my paragraphs that way.” And she rarely did, before high school. :)</p>
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<p>Personally, I couldn’t disagree more. To become a better writer, one needs to put pen/pencil to paper, a LOT, obtain feedback, rewrite, obtain feedback…</p>
<p>Reading just makes one a better reader and can build vocabulary. I know lots of voracious readers, but most are poor writers. </p>
<p>For critical thinking skills, I like philosophy.</p>
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<p>Hunt, I hope you don’t mind if a college-aged kid jumps in …</p>
<p>Therese/OP, I think it depends on why you’re trying to improve your writing. If you want to improve your writing for the sake of improving your writing, go to the next paragraph. If it’s for the SAT, don’t worry too much about reading The New Yorker or anything of the sort – just do enough practice questions and actually go over them to understand what you missed and why. You’ll start to see patterns eventually on the type of things you should focus on.</p>
<p>To improve your writing for the sake of it, read some non-fiction books on whatever you’re interested in. If it’s chemistry, for example, you can read Napoleon’s Buttons. If it’s politics, you can read a biography of some political figure you like. Don’t read trashy fiction novels thinking that any type of reading is worthwhile; things like Plum Spooky or 50 Shades of Grey do nothing for your writing skills. Someone mentioned essays a while back; those are great to read. David Sedaris and similar authors are a lot of fun, too. You get a feel for how to write informally from him, and learn to be funny along the way, but not everyone is fond of him. You could also write your own short stories, which can be fun. No one needs to see them, but you can get a lot out of proofreading them by yourself.</p>
<p>As for creative writing classes… don’t, don’t, don’t. I’m taking a creative writing class right now to fill my arts requirement, and my freshman year roommate took it last year. Neither of us was satisfied with our respective experiences. I’d often see kids editing others’ drafts in various classes, and from what I saw, the writing was scary: it was mostly word vomit, and long, drawn-out pages with very graphic descriptions of gruesome violence, rape, and bordering-on-pornographic sex scenes. I asked my roommate if this was common; apparently it was, and shocked roomie just as much. Now that I’m taking the class with a different group of kids at a different school, the story hasn’t changed much. The writing is often poor, and the grammar errors would make most schoolmarms reach for their bottom-drawer bottle. The violent/sex-based story lines haven’t changed much, either, and the readings are primarily post-modern short stories deemed “art” that feature, wait for it, prominent sex scenes and graphic descriptions of violence that go well beyond good taste. I suppose you could get lucky and have a really solid professor who goes over grammar errors, helps you move a story forward, etc, but that happens very rarely – it’s mostly a very touchy-feely, new-age experience where any critiques are deemed as “crushing to the creative spirit.” That said, there will be one or two especially pedantic kids in the class who are “writers” in their own mind, and they will go crazy over a number of little things to prove their superiority. Their critiques are mostly meant to bring you down, though, and the class, outside of filling a requirement, certainly won’t make you a better writer.</p>
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<p>Agree. You learn to write by writing. My D had several excellent English teachers all through middle and high school. They read plenty but they also wrote on an almost daily basis. The teachers worked very hard because they got fast and thorough feedback for rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. I also pitched in and read lots of things she wrote, requiring extra rewrites.</p>