How to Teach Writing to Teenagers and Everyone Else
I like weird kids, angry kids, sad, bad, and perfect kids. I was searching for a learned quote from an “expert” in adolescent writing — how to teach it — and recognized I’m an expert. But I don’t have a degree in linguistics or psychology or reading. My master’s is in fiction writing. However, I have taught writing to writers for thirty years and most have been young adults, many of them struggling with college admission essays. In college I taught creative writing and freshman composition and in high school I taught AP literature, AP language and composition, creative writing, critical thinking, and honors, at every grade level and non-honors at every grade level. I have taught refugees, first generation college students, gang members, Emirate high school girls in Abu Dhabi, super privileged North Shore students, worked with students on the spectrum, with learning issues, and perfect ACT scores. One thing I have learned is writing is a crucial skill for everyone and writing for young adults can change their lives in a positive way. Writing can be taught and can be learned and while everyone might not have the next world changing novel in them, everyone can find their voice and make that voice more effective and compelling through reading and writing and drafting and a willingness to see their work as process.
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My company, The Teachers Way, came to focus on college essays as an almost universal assignment that many students find challenging. Asking a seventeen-year-old, even one who may have experienced a tsunami, gun violence, or losing a soccer game, to sum up their philosophy of life in six-hundred and fifty words is asking for something that a reader will likely skim after the opening sentence. When I was seventeen, I was mad at my parents, called myself an existentialist, and saw injustice in every situation where I was not treated like an experienced adult. I had little experience and I was not an adult. However, I had English teachers that encouraged my thoughtfulness, my sense of humor, and my hope for positive change. I was an avid reader and had role models of great writers to inspire me. I had a major problem with commas which was constantly commented on as well as margins and transitions. Here’s an expert piece of literacy advice: stress the positive, limit the negative, and suggest how the writer can move forward.
Yes, I’m writing another novel, but I also wrote both my parents’ obituaries, a letter to a dying friend, and recently, on a lighter note, an irate email to our condo association and neighbors about the incursion of Canadian geese on our balcony, huge, awful, Canadian geese. I got results nearly immediately. Like finances and manners, writing needs to be taught. Writing teachers should assign many shortish papers, read them fast, and return with notes. The pedagogy of teaching writing needs to be respected, researched, and developed so we communicate effectively. It’s a hard job but if you claim to know how writing can improve and want to help a seventeen-year-old survivor of watching her friend gunned down on the street write her college essay full of hope and grief and unforgettable details, you’ll do it. That’s what I do.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach