Not really, unless he’s reading excellent writing on his iPad. Honestly–and I’ll say this again–there is no way, no way at all, to become an excellent writer without doing substantial reading of very well-written texts. It’s especially important to read great writing across the curriculum: fiction, non-fiction (science writing, social science/criticism, psychology, philosophy, history, etc.), book-length, essay/short story-length, even poetry.
The first step is to read a lot.
The five paragraph essay is a perfectly valid lesson in structured writing that is so ubiquitous because it is extremely useful for demonstrating many important features of academic style writing. Don’t discount it so carelessly.
The first step is to write a lot. This is not controversial; current best practices have kindergarteners writing as soon as they learn the alphabet.
I remember, at a faculty party, a Shakespearean telling a non-native-speaker professor of physics that, if he wanted to write better, he should read Shakespeare. How silly! How does reading Shakespeare translate into writing physics articles? There is nothing causal about reading making good writers. Perhaps there is some correlation in that people who like language (and are metalinguistically aware) tend to do both well, but reading does not in any direct way make better writing.
For the elite school students/alums who are good writers, yes for the most part. However, one can easily go through undergrad without becoming a coherent writer, much less a good one even if one had the benefit of great public/private schools and coming from a well-off SES background.
Saw a few cases of this among undergrad classmates at my undergrad alma mater, at 2 elite us where I took some courses, and even among some grad school classmates at an elite U.
One older undergrad classmate wrote so incoherently and poorly throughout undergrad and even in grad school that I still sometimes wondered how he was allowed to graduate from his respectable mid-Atlantic boarding school. This was underscored when he still didn’t get why his grad school Prof wanted him to redo his seminar paper even after said Prof provided clear feedback…such as pleading with him to ensure single sentences do not take up nearly an entire page.
In the workplace, we’ve had a few elite/Ivy graduates whose written communication skills were problematic enough that they were “counseled” about it by our supervisors. And they were native born and grew up in upper/upper-middle class backgrounds.
Recently when helping a college alum friend who also graduated from a top 3 elite U graduate program organize some papers for decluttering, he was quite embarrassed when we came across 3 graduate papers he wrote while in the elite program which were drowned in red ink and graded accordingly.
While he still received a passing grade for those essays, the grade was so low he recounted he was brought before his advisor and warned that unless he improved fast, there was a possibility he may not finish his first year of a 2 year MA program. He was fortunately able to improve and reflected that the poor quality of those grad essays were all due to his not availing himself enough of writing instructors/tutoring offered at his private day school and our undergrad.
I didn’t–it was a holdover from the previous teacher’s syllabus. I replaced it the following year with a unit on postmodern narrative strategies.
I’m not at all against assigning narrative writing! In fact, I bookended my last few years’ writing syllabi with narratives (and did zero 5-graf essays–they learned that the previous year and my 11th grade were expected to produce structures that suited their needs rather than a tried-and-true convention). But fiction/creative writing is a different animal.
Just saying. Since mamalion mentioned him, Shakespeare is the greatest. In my school, we started him in 9th. Changed my life. Reading was no longer just about a story, I was utterly fascinated with how he made words sing, how they could fit together just so. It’s not just reading, but love of how a story is told, an appreciation for how it’s done. I wanted to have that skill.
You don’t just need reading or writing practice. Bad writing repeated is still bad writing (or weak writing.) A teacher can focus on the mechanics, but not the soul of it simply by pointing out errors. What a kid needs is inspiration to make his words speak for him or her, whether the context is recounting bullets in history, an analysis, or a narrative well told. He needs to learn writing is a craft. That takes time.
If anyone wants a great across-the-curriculum reading list of relatively short texts selected and sequenced to teach writing skills, feel free to PM me. I’ve more or less retired that syllabus and am happy to share.
How does reading make one a better writer? Like so…
It trains the ear in things like rhythm, structure, syntax, dialogue, sentence and paragraph length, rhetorical devices, tone, mood, metaphor, parallelism, diction, scansion, point of view, dialect, etc. Reading exposes the writer to things that work and things that don’t.
Reading trains writing the same way listening trains speech.
More on writing.
Reading forms the foundation, but along with reading comes practice.
Heinlien has some guidelines for writing practice. I’ve found them helpful, so I’ll share them.
- You must write.
Seems pretty obvious, eh? I’ve heard from lots of writers who want to write, who dream about writing, who have lots of ideas about what to write… but they don’t actually write.
A writer writes. A sucky first draft is better than no first draft. You can fix the suck, but you can’t fix what doesn’t exist.
- You must finish what you write.
This one is mostly aimed at fiction writers. The first few lines of a poem, the first few paragraphs of a short story, the first few pages of a novel - these are great, but you’ve got to finish them. Finishing things is scary. If you don’t write it or don’t finish it, it can’t suck, right? The brilliant shiny idea can live on in unsullied perfection in your head if you just don’t finish it. Writers caught in this particular trap don’t progress because they start something, get stuck, start something else, get stuck again, etc.
Finish it. A finished first draft that sucks is better for your progress than a brilliant two page opening that goes nowhere.
Heinlein has more rules, but they’re for writers who are trying to sell their work and make a career, so I’ll talk more about finishing things and how to practice efficiently.
How do you know when something is finished?
It’s finished when the stated unit (a poem, an essay, an article, a scene, etc.) is both complete and polished. Polishing means you read back through, fix typos or grammar errors, tighten your prose, fix awkward bits, look up that source you needed, etc. Finished means the product is a final draft, and it’s the best you can make it in the time allotted and at your current skill level.
There’s a trap here, though. Some writers revise endlessly, doing 5, 6, 7 or twenty or more drafts, and often the changes are so small as to be meaningless to the overall quality. A writer caught in the revision trap isn’t making the work better, s/he’s just making it different, and his / her skills aren’t growing.
An aspiring writer’s practice time is better spent doing no more than 2 or 3 polish drafts, then moving on and writing something new. Apply the lessons learned to the new piece instead of endlessly revising the last one.
Now for ongoing practice - IMHO the best practice has a specifically stated technical goal (or goals).
Don’t just write an essay or a short story. Write an essay where you decide you’re going to practice parallelism, transitions and a satirical tone. Write a short story where you’re going to practice fast pacing, and a first person POV from a gender that’s not your own. Write a short story using flashbacks and the 4-1-2-3-5 structure where your goal is to make the reader cry. Twice!
Targeted technical practice develops writer’s skill set much in same way that athletes do wind sprints, strength straining and specific skills practice in between games.
Oops, edit window expired: *Heinlein
How could private school kids get chances to write 20 page papers while public school kids not? Too many AP’s in public schools? I don’t think too many AP’s in high school are necessary. Students should focus on fundamentals.
Making words sing and dance makes sense. It would be nice to makeup some along the way like Shakespeare did, e.g., eyeball and cold-blooded.
Sounds like listening and watching short YouTube pieces may help writing as well (I want to believe this is true because I don’t have a voracious reader). Obviously writing practice is key.
“How could private school kids get chances to write 20 page papers while public school kids not?” Our public school teachers have about 160 students. I imagine the load is less at private schools. But my own public school teachers did manage to grade papers, so I think it’s kind of lazy of the English/history teachers. They could assign 15 pages rather than 20 to lessen the burden, and also I am pretty sure that no one is teaching 6 sections of AP English/history, so the lower level classes could have shorter papers due at other times. I also don’t buy that there is just no time to teach how to write these papers, especially in English, where there is less of a defined curriculum that kids have to learn as compared to the history APs which do cover an enormous amount of material. I’ve been shocked by some of the excuses that English and history teachers have made for their lack of willingness to teach basic competencies in writing.
I just get frustrated with kids who say they love to write, that they write all the time, but don’t know how to evaluate a finished piece. I just believe it’s not only the doing, but the ability to step back and view the results with a critical eye/ear/whatever. To not be satisfied simply to scribble out, meet a word count goal or somehow answer a prompt. A great boss once warned me about something he called “pride of authorship.” That’s people who see so much of themselves in their writing that they won’t edit, it’s not “them.”
Here’s an interesting one to chew on, though I think it speaks more to people who are writers (on whatever level.) I personally think good writing starts with having something good to say. And that comes from how one thinks and observes, then can control him/herself. http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/writing-rules-advice-from-the-new-york-times-on-writing-well/?_r=0
We started talking about hs writing, though. That is formula.
Our public school kids wrote 20 page papers. It took longer for them to get back the comments than I had to wait at my private school, but especially in history, the teacher were quite conscientious. They also practice writing AP test type answers, but I don’t think that was five paragraph essay stuff. That was more how to do a document based essay response. Anne LaMotte’s Bird by Bird is a fun read and full of good frank advice about how to get started writing.
At my public magnet, not only were non-AP classes assigning multiple 10-15 page papers, we also had to submit a 20 page English lit thesis as a mandatory graduation requirement on top of our regular workload.
And IME, the HS teachers were much more strict about marking up, grading us down, and sometimes browbeating us about our subpar writing skills than my college or grad Profs at an elite U. To be fair, those HS English/Humanities/Social Science teachers did prepare me well for writing in college/grad school and in the workplace.
I’ll also chime in to add that Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers is an excellent desk companion for grammar/mechanics/format/style and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well is far superior to Strunk & White.
^ ^
One undergrad classmate hated Strunk & White’s so much that when he finished his expository writing class which mandated its use, he celebrated by using it to start an outdoor bonfire to roast marshmellows, sausages, etc.
I think that to become a better writer, you must write.
For someone in high-school or before, I’d suggest writing keeping a blog. The blog might be on a hobby or whatever; the key is to produce, regularly, some written content. In pursuing this, a young person would start to find their voice and gain confidence. With this experience, applying oneself to more formal writing becomes easier.
I didn’t realize there are layers of qualifications of writing and with a science background I’m afraid I don’t fully comprehend what some posters are talking about. However, I wanted my son to be a better writer so he can express himself clearly and attractively whenever he needs to in writing. Here I see some actionable suggestions and I no longer have that much sinking feeling mentioned in the OP. It’s unlikely to make a voracious reader or prolific blogger out of him simply because he’s not such a person that sits in one place for too long. But with inputs from posters here I think he can be a better writer, maybe not “ends up being 6 foot 10!” as @MurphyBrown puts it, 6-1 is still good, even literally.