My son is a delightful, witty, intelligent kid. Unfortunately, none of this shows up in his writing. He does very well with lab reports and explanations of factual things (history, etc.) but anything in which one is expected to be creative or have a “voice” is kind of charmless. He’s a workhorse. He manages to get As on most writing assignments, as what he writes is always technically correct (follows the rubric, impeccable grammar and spelling, good word choice). I’m concerned that his application essays will suffer … any ideas on how he can become a more interesting writer in the next two years? The ideas that I have are journaling (but he would need to get some feedback somehow), or reading “better” literature (he’s a Stephen King/Tom Clancy fan). I suppose the biggest issue is making him CARE or recognize that he may have issues – his view is that he gets As on his writing, so he just needs to keep on doing what he’s doing. Any suggestions? Thank you!
We pulled one of our kids out in fifth grade to homeschool him. He was having some dyslexia issues and needed to catch up. He ended up staying home for a couple years and eventually became a pretty good writer. My wife went with Andrew Pudewa’s writing series from IEW to help him build skills. The bad news is it’s a bunch of really boring drills to force you to write in specific ways (eg use three different transitions in this paragraph, use four different adjectives on that sentence) but the good news is it really works. It forces you to put more than one thought in a sentence. You have to build vocabulary to be able to say things several ways. You are forced to identify and remove repetition in language and structure and sentence length. By the end you can see where repeating similar words can establish a good rhythm or be destructively boring. Not cheap to buy the videos, not sure if there’s a book that sums it up, but it worked for him.
Oh, and he needs to read better writers. Just as you can’t learn to cook by eating McDonald’s, you won’t learn to recognize better things until you’re exposed to them. Tom Clancy is fun, but he’s junk food.
Find something with some clever word play that isn’t too long and is kind of funny. I always loved Three Men In a Boat by Jerome K Jerome or Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, but there are other places to find good writing than dead British novelists.