Read the Room
Coaching writers requires the ability to understand your writer and quickly scan them for a number of factors including low self-esteem, damage from poor teaching, a false sense of skill, and an overall fear of process. Your objective is to increase their confidence in themselves while establishing a relationship that welcomes feedback. In other words, read the room! Because I often work with students writing their Common Application and supplementary essays or students struggling in English or history, there is often an extra welcome challenge: parents.
I am a parent; I love and respect parents but sometimes they block progress in their offspring as that offspring struggles to discover their authentic and unique voice. Parents, on the whole, view their children as gifted and wonderful. Curating their child’s achievements, setbacks and hopes can impede the process of writing a powerful essay with a strong message that reveals a unique viewpoint. Years ago, I made a single suggestion to my own son beyond grammar and possibly sentence flow. His response was “Mom, that sounds like a middle-aged woman.” Yes, I was outraged because I’m an expert in adolescent literacy, but I was also his mother and I wanted him to sound nicer.
Parental controls and the overly ‘helpful’ writing consultant might produce something stunning and effective, but that essay will not be unique because the writer did not discover her own voice.
How do I coach rather than write? Collaboration. We share ideas, they write. I assign writing exercises, they write. I make suggestions and find threads that woven together may be their true story. Or not. We laugh a lot and sometimes there are tears. I don’t care if they sound nice. I want them to discover practical ways to make their writing better not just for this one assignment or college application but for their future writing life. It’s all about process, drafts and revisions. It’s about discovering what is real and what will translate into an essay that the reader can’t stop reading, that completes an application perfectly.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach