Three small ways to help your teen’s writing . . . that might help your own.

Hello to the parents out there – particularly of middle schoolers and high schoolers.

As the school year starts to wind down, your child may be tackling an essay or two. Life is busy, so I can appreciate if you want to leave the essay editing to the teachers.

That said, I am going to enter a small vote for reading your teen’s essay, ideally with your child, before the essay gets submitted.

When you read someone’s writing, you glean new insights into that individual – how he or she thinks, and what he or she notices. I think you’ll be surprised in pleasant ways, seeing how your teen analyzes the source material and what he or she deems important.

There are three small tweaks I often suggest to my own kids’ writing.

Here they are:

1.      “This” is not a noun – at least not one we want to use.

My kids tend to write, “This shows that. . .” or “This was interesting because. . .”

The writing becomes a lot stronger if we add a descriptive word:

For example, “This incident shows that. . .” or “This dialogue was interesting because. . .”

2.      Quality control: print or speak aloud.

I implore my kids to do their own proofreading before we look at their text. My pleas tend to fall on deaf ears, however, because they don’t like to print their essays. (And they are a little. . . “unenthusiastic” about my advice.)

I am all for ecology, but printing is really valuable for helping to uncover rough spots in the text.

Alternatively, I am a big fan of Microsoft Word’s feature that will speak the text aloud. See the Review tab, [Read Aloud]. Google Docs has a similar feature, under Tools, [Accessibility].

Through either printing or speaking the text, your teen will tend to get a better feel for flow, word choice, and missing words. If there’s a particularly tough patch in the essay, you could also ask your child to read the text out loud.

3.      Depth over length

The long quote, indented, smartly justified, can be appealing to beginning writers. With one fell swoop, they get to pad that word count.

When I review my kids’ writing, I tend to find the block quote is usually not needed. Typically, there is a phrase or two that would be better woven into the text.

This idea is not always well received, admittedly. (Why move from five sentences to one?)

Still, it can be a fitting time to extol the benefits of brevity. Your child’s English teacher may thank you.

These same ideas may have some small applications in corporate writing. Being more exacting in your word choice, proofing your text, and remembering that “less is more” may enhance your own writing style. And that evolution is something you can share, writer to writer, with your teen.