My kids are heading to college in the Fall and despite going to “good high schools” I have doubts that they are prepared for college level writing.
Am curious what other experiences parents have had, and what you might do to help them get better prepared. I keep telling them to get more feedback from their teachers, with little impact. And am considering having them tutored.
They’re not. Even when they think they are. Which is why many colleges have a mandatory first year writing course.
But unless your kids are behind their peers, there is likely nothing requiring parental intervention.
Good readers are usually good writers.
Make sure you have plenty of well-written material lying around- Economist, New Yorker, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. Model reading-- when you are tempted to pop on Netflix to veg out for an hour with another episode of a sitcom you’ve seen three times, do your kids see you pick up an actual book instead? A biography of someone great or a scoundrel, the history of disease, Joan Didion, doesn’t matter.
One of my parents taught middle school and lamented (until her dying day) the elimination of traditional grammar and rhetoric in favor of a more fluid? less structured? way of teaching kids to write. You are probably observing this if you don’t think your kids can write at a college level. But keep them reading challenging material for as long as they are under your roof- and make sure they enroll in the dreaded but oh-so-necessary “Freshman Composition” which usually has a much sexier name these days!!!
Tutor? You’re closing the barn door after the horse has left and is already on vacation. How do you tutor a HS senior??? The college composition class will kick their $%^&, and that will push them into better reading and writing habits.
I was surprised at what good writers the kids turned out to be, since I thought that the school’s writing curriculum was awful - years spent on formulaic 5 paragraph essays, and never enough writing assignments, no big papers. But they all did fine in college writing, placed out of first year writing classes, got A’s in the mandatory second writing class.
I agree, best thing at this point is to encourage them to read a lot, and advise them to look for the freshman writing seminars with the best teachers.
I saw the same thing with my daughter. She was a poor writer at the end of high school but developed into a pretty decent one by the end of college. (She presented her senior project via Zoom snd did an excellent job.)
Agreeing with the above posters.
Instead of trying to get a HS senior to be tutored in writing “just in case” their skills need work (ha!), when you are touring colleges or when you take them to school next fall, note the writing center (100% there will be one). Tell them that a pro-move is to go introduce yourself to the writing center people before there is even an assignment, to find out how it works. At the start of term the people who run the writing center typically have time on their hands and they want to start knowing the first years, so they will be very welcoming. Then, when when your student gets their first writing assignment, they can take a draft into to the writing center to get feedback- as in ‘is this the sort of thing that Prof X typically looks for?’. It’s using a uni resource to get “inside” info.
A lot of new college students associate asking for help with failure / not being good enough / embarrassment. An important life skill is to get over that idea, and start seeing it as using all the resources available to you.
ps, the same goes for the math center…
I agree that the campus writing center should be on every freshman’s list. Go early and get to know the tutors.
I worked in a campus writing center for a couple of years. Too many students come in at the last minute. They should have come in much earlier. Stating the obvious, but I tell all my students that when a professor gives you a deadline for three weeks in the future, it’s because a student needs to spend three weeks working on the project. Not one week, or worse, two days.
I had students come in who had assignments due that afternoon. I didn’t judge them, but again, it goes without saying that the student was lucky if they got a passing grade.
The level of writing expected at college is higher than what they did in high school. It’s even more important to use the right source materials and to learn how to do citations. I tell students that citations are basically how you prove what you state. My favorite source for all things writing related is Purdue OWL. Here’s the link to their citation styles page: MLA Formatting and Style Guide - Purdue OWL® - Purdue University
To the OP, if your child is at all inclined to spend some time prepping for college writing, have him or her look at this page, if nothing else. Citations are time consuming and confusing. My #1 top tip to make life easier in college writing is to note WHERE your source is when you cite it. Do it immediately because it’s very hard to go back and find it later.
Of course, the most basic and critical rule of good writing is support your thesis. I always ask the student to tell me if the sentence or paragraph in question is supporting the thesis. If it isn’t, fix it. Or scrap it. The thesis is pretty much always in the first paragraph and I tell students they should refer back to it regularly. It’s pretty easy to drift away from a thesis statement, so the student needs to remember where they were going with the point in question.
I wouldn’t worry too much. My son, who is dyslexic, was a terrible writer. Unfortunately for him, he had to run all his high school writing by me. It was painful for sure. In college, he has come to me and asked me to review his work. His writing skills are decent now, but he’ll never be an editor, that’s for sure. He has me so he doesn’t need to use the campus tutoring center, but the kids who work there know what they are doing. They will be trained and have good writing skills.
And to bring this back to the OP’s question, I don’t see any benefit right now to have them tutored for college level writing. Parents have approached me with similar requests. Without an assignment or particular goal to aim for, tutoring isn’t going to help much. It’s just going to frustrate them and turn them against writing.
Thanks @blossom @collegemom3717 @parentologist @skieurope @MaineLonghorn @Lindagaf. All good advice — will move on to worrying about something else 
My children were all very strong writers in high school. They also were strong readers, but even they were surprised at the level of writing required by their college courses. They were able to adapt and “upgrade” without too many issues because they had a strong base.
With our middle daughter, who needed those “three weeks” to prepare a decent essay, we hired her former (recently retired) English teacher to tutor. Our daughter never lacked for ideas, nor “creative inspiration”, she just needed time to narrow down her “tangents”. She would never have agreed to have a tutor for English, but when we told her she needed to get help with her “time management”, on her essays, for the SAT then she agreed.
Thanks @aunt_bea. I think my son would agree to help for “procrastination” rather than. Writing per se, so that helps. Not a great reader unfortunately, prefers manga.
I love the grammar and writing books available. One of my favorites was The Grammatical Lawyer, which is a collection of 1 to 2 page essays on language. For example, accept and except; their/they’re/there; when to use ‘whether’ or ‘whether or not’; further and father.
I’d just leave the books around the house and read one or two of them when I had time. Most were just a review/reminder for me, but every now and then I’d read one that I had never considered before.
I have quite a few of these books (Grammar for Dummies; Writing tips by Scalia and Gardner; Strunk and White.
My D22 attends a very rigorous magnet program that expects a lot of writing and she is a beautiful writer. Last year’s instruction was spotty and kids are really feeling lost at the demands this year. It has gone way beyond citations and organization and identification of symbols and is now focused on rigorous critical thinking. It’s tying symbols to theme and looking at the writer’s point of view, etc. My daughter has had to go in at lunch several times and work with the teacher to understand the level of examples, specificity and analysis necessary for A work.
So, I am in the minority here and would say, yes, get a tutor or have your child work with the teacher on this. Beautiful prose may come or not — reading really is a good way to boost that skill. What I see as more important is clear writing and the understanding of how to support a thesis.
Your kid will be writing across the curriculum in college…and most of it will be non-fiction writing. Even in English literature classes, the students are writing about what they read…not creating stories of their own.
Your kid will need to write science lab reports, papers about things in history, ethics, explanations of how math problems were solved.
It’s not just writing prose.
“ . What I see as more important is clear writing and the understanding of how to support a thesis.” As written above…this is important.