How to raise a good writer



The true alchemists do not change lead into gold;
they change the world into words. ~ William H. Gass

This is my tried and true approach to raising a good writer.

1. Make words a fun, happy, safe, communal thing in your home. Play with words (knock-knock jokes, Mad Libs, magnetic poetry, any of dozens of genuinely fun, noninstructional card and board games, etc.). Point out clever phrasing when you notice it. Read great (fun!) novels and interesting (fun!) reference books together. Talk about how ads in magazines and signs on businesses are worded and why it might or might not generate any business. Laugh together over words and about words.
   
2. Love words yourself and let it show.
   
3. Fill your home with paper, notebooks, a large variety of pens and pencils, computers with word-processing software and access to the Internet. These are toys for writers! A trip to the office-supply store is bliss.
   
4. Learn to distinguish between writing (content), handwriting, and adherence to rules for spelling and grammar. They are very different things, and a person can be great at any one of them without having any special talent for the others. Also, real writers have keyboards and editors; your child can rely on that, or get through life with spell-checkers and grammar-checkers like most of the known universe.
   
5. Never, ever, ever point out spelling or grammatical errors in a young person's writing. Some people's passion for writing will stand up to this kind of abuse, but it shouldn't have to. Keep in mind that using creative spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure is a natural phase of early writing. Most of us do eventually learn where the period goes and that "cat" is spelled with a "c." Trust.
   
   And meanwhile, focus on content. Share your natural enthusiasm for that, and be cognizant of the fact that by sharing his writing with you, your child is bestowing an honor. Appreciate it!
   
   Note: There is one time when it's okay to offer yourself up as proofreader and that's when your kid is submitting his writing for consideration in order to meet his own goal: winning a prize, getting published, gaining admittance to college, things like that. Otherwise, wait to be asked.
   
6. Protect your child's creativity from writing curricula and well-meaning friends and relatives. The approved essay format, with its rigid structure and counted sentences and paragraphs, can stifle creativity. And Aunt Martha's kindly meant comments to your seven-year-old about subject-verb agreement might serve only to dampen a budding writer's joy in all that is wondrous about writing. Step up and step in, if for no other reason than to show your child that she has choices.
   
7. Respect every writer's privacy. The things your child writes are his to share or not share as he chooses. In the absence of an invitation—and, no, that paper or journal left in plain sight is not an invitation—do what you have to do to control your urge to peek.
   
8. After creating a home where writing is valued and considered fun, check to see if your kid is a writer right now. She might not be, and that's okay! If she is, you will know it; writers write and nobody has to make us do it.
   
   If she isn't, repeat steps 1 through 7, not with the goal of making her into a writer but because words are a playground you can enjoy as a family.

A new service for unschooling bloggers

If you would like me to copyedit your blog posts, you can send them to me here. I will endeavor to get them back to you within a few hours (unless you're in Europe or an early riser on the East Coast). I will limit my edits to spelling and grammar, leaving your writing style intact, and you will of course have the final say on what gets published.

My motivation for doing this is simple: Good writers are not necessarily good editors. I'd like to minimize editorial issues that distract readers from the important themes being discussed on unschooling blogs.

This is a free service.

Commas!

Here are a couple of great reference pages about comma use.

Terribly Write's Top 5 Comma Errors
Purdue Online Writing Lab Extended Rules for Using Commas

My pet peeves recently—aside from (shoot me now) apostrophes in plurals—are commas between month and year when no date appears and commas between subject and verb.

Wrong: It is not January, 2010.
Right: Okay, it is January 2010, but only if you write it correctly.

Wrong: Being alone in your obsessions, can be aggravating.
Right: Being alone in your obsessions can be aggravating.

A quickie note about commas

Yes, it's pet peeve time again, punctuation category.

No comma is necessary when writing
only the month and year of a date.

Correct: May 2009
Icky: May, 2009

Developers of software clocks and calendars often get this wrong. Don't let them fool ya!

Apostrophes redux, short form

The only times you should use an apostrophe are when:

• You are contracting two words together, such as when "they are" becomes "they're" or "she is" becomes "she's." The apostrophe goes in for the missing letters.
  
• You are describing something that belongs to or is part of someone or something, such as in "David's dog" or "a hard day's night."

It's simple. Really!

Note: The long, somewhat bitchy form is here.

Pet peeve of the day: apostrophes

I haven't ranted about grammar and punctuation in quite some time, and I'm sure you've all been missing it. So, here we go.

Plurals do not need apostrophes!

Can I just say that again, louder? This is a big pet peeve of mine.

PLURALS DO NOT NEED APOSTROPHES!!!!

Thank you.

Correct: She took her ten dogs for a walk.
Icky: She took her ten dog's for a walk.

Full disclosure: In informal writing, I sometimes break this rule for acronyms. For example, I have a hard time writing "She knows her ABCs," even though I know it is letter perfect. So, I might be inclined to let it slide if you were to type "She knows her ABC's," although I would still NOTICE that damned apostrophe.

For readability, I also sometimes settle for "yes's and no's" instead of the "yeses and noes" that is correct but awfully weird looking.

Contractions need apostrophes!

Let's take let's. In case you were unaware, let's is short for let us. It gets an apostrophe in place of the letters we drop when we contract the two words into one.

Correct: Let's go for a walk.
Icky: Lets go for a walk.

Conversely, lets is a form of the verb to let and does not get an apostrophe.

Correct: She lets me go for a walk.
Icky: She let's me go for a walk.

Note: Verbs only get apostrophes in contractions or if you're waxing Tom Robbins-poetic about the usefulness of a particular verb: Her vocabulary found little stimulation in get's heavy workout that day.

I have previously ranted about it's and its. And don't even get me started on you're and your or they're, their, and there. Oops, too late! But I'll try to keep it simple: Only the contractions get apostrophes.

Possessives need apostrophes, and be careful where you put them!

Here's a quick lesson in possessives. If you are talking about a single person or critter or object, it is apostrophe then s.

Correct: David's dog, the dog's collar, the collar's buckle

If it's a plural that already ends in s, just tack on the apostrophe.

Correct: the Maiers' house, the animals' habits, the bananas' ripeness

When in doubt, see if you can write around the apostrophe.

Words that need apostrophes can be written another way.
"David's dog" can become "the dog belonging to David."
"The bananas' ripeness" can become "the ripeness of the bananas."
"You're funny" can become "You are funny."

But there is no easy, not-silly way to write around "She took her ten dogs for a walk" or "She lets me go for a walk." If you can't write around it, it doesn't need an apostrophe.

End rant.

I love Chicago

If you haven't yet discovered the monthly Q&A at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/, I recommend it. Those wacky University of Chicago Press editors always have something fun to say.

An excerpt from this month:
Q. As you know, CMOS 6.64 says, “When a colon introduces two or more sentences . . . the first word following it is capitalized.” The two examples seem to suggest that the sentences following must comprise a series of some sort... Can you clarify what it means to “introduce” two or more sentences?

A. I think you’ve got the idea. There are bound to be gray areas where a person could interpret more than one sentence as “being introduced by” the colon. But if the material introduced by the colon clearly runs out at the end of the first sentence, that first sentence is lowercased.

• She clung to her wishes: She wished the evil prince hadn’t eaten the golden egg. She wished he would leave the kingdom forever. And she wished someone would do her ironing.
• She was furious: she wished the evil prince would leave the kingdom forever. But meanwhile, there wasn’t an egg left in the house and the laundry was waiting.

...

What unschooling looked like in the middle of the night

I usually try to avoid making a big deal of the schoolish moments that happen in our house, because it tends to make non-unschoolers (schoolers?) think that unschooling *only* works when schoolish moments happen. But this was too cool, so I have to talk about it.

Last night, Chloe confessed that she isn't sure she's acquiring skills marketable enough to land a job when she's old enough. We talked about her options some, then I made an offhand comment about her abilities as a proofreader. One thing led to another and we were soon huddled around the computer playing with words. I typed out a series of flawed sentences, then Chloe corrected them. It was so fun! We played with changing punctuation to completely change the meaning of a sentence, and we found some badly written paragraphs on the Internet that she and I fixed in different ways. This went on until three in the morning!

Here are a couple of examples that made her laugh. The first I borrowed from a recent discussion of punctuation on Grammar Geeks.

Woman without her man is a savage.
Woman: without her, man is a savage.

Real men don't eat spinach, but I like it.
Real men don't eat, Spinach, but I like it.

I discovered to my delight that Chloe knows how to punctuate speech perfectly, and she—normally the queen of lowercase—knows perfectly well that the pronoun "I" is always capitalized. What can I say? Such things are near and dear to my heart.

She told me one of her pet peeves from reading fan fiction. I will share it here in the hopes that somebody somewhere will see the error of his ways. She says fan-fiction authors often write spoken questions like this:

"Are you crazy" he asked?

That is very bad indeed, and I can only thank my lucky stars that I have never come across such wretched punctuating. Here is the corrected question:

"Are you crazy?" he asked.

With Chloe reassured of her skills, we talked about how this is one of the perils of unschooling: sometimes unschooled kids have little idea of how much they have learned. Kids in school get regular validation (or correction), and they are constantly compared to their schoolmates, so they have some feel for where in the spectrum their knowledge falls. Unschooled kids know that they are experts or budding experts in the areas they are passionate about (manga, music, karate, Swahili, whatever), but they don't always realize how much general knowledge they've acquired. So, Chloe had no idea she is an expert at grammar and punctuation, and she will tell you that she is bad at math, just after she's added a column of numbers in her head or worked a fraction problem effortlessly. We'll work on it.

A small rant about spelling and grammar checkers

I hate to break it to you, dear readers, but you can't trust your spell-checker. I've spent today writing in Microsoft Office Word and being disgusted with the number of things it tells me are wrong that are actually correct. Here are a few examples:

Word thinks "noninventory" is misspelled. Actually, Word thinks just about any word starting with "non" that doesn't have a hyphen in there is misspelled. This is simply not the case. The Chicago Manual of Style and the American Heritage Dictionary agree: "non" words are nonhyphenated unless:

• The hyphen is arguably needed for legibility (non-native)
• The "non" comes before an already modified compound
  (non-English-speaking)
• The non is part of a Latin phrase (non sequitur)

Watch out for this sort of spell-checker confusion whenever you're using a prefix. Chicago says compounds made from all of these prefixes should be closed (no hyphen, no space) in most cases: ante, anti, bi, bio, co, counter, extra, infra, inter, intra, macro, meta, micro, mid, mini, multi, neo, non, over, post, pre, pro, proto, pseudo, re, semi, socio, sub, super, supra, trans, ultra, un, and under.

Word has as much it's and its confusion as the next guy. Word told me that "it's" in the following sentence should be "its".

The file is not ready for review, but it's close.

This is simply not the case. That "it's" would only be "its" if I were talking about the close (of business, of the letter).

"It's" is a contraction standing for "it is." The verb that is tucked in there means "it's" tends to come before adjectives ("it's hot") or gerunds ("it's going to be another hot day tomorrow"). It's active or descriptive.

"Its" is about possession and always comes before nouns (although the nouns might be modified by an adjective first, as in "I was distracted by its faulty reasoning"). It's its own thing.

Word can't handle a little creative writing. Finally, Word is forever getting lost in my sentences and telling me my subjects and verbs do not agree, when clearly they do. Of course, this one might be just the tiniest bit my fault for writing such long sentences. :-)

Anyway, the point is, don't turn off the spell-checker or grammar-checker in your head. If you think the checker in your software is mistaken about something, you just might be right! Get a second opinion!

P.S. I should clarify something. It is not that Word actually thinks "non-inventory" is preferable to "noninventory." There are simply too many possible "non" words for all of them to be in Word's dictionary. So, it doesn't recognize "noninventory" at all, but when you type "non-inventory" instead, it recognizes "non-" as a prefix that is in the dictionary, and it determines that "inventory" is spelled correctly. I don't know why it doesn't recognize "non" as a prefix without the hyphen; that was evidently too much refinement for the developers to cope with.

I should also point out (or maybe I just want to) that if you previously had blind faith in your word processor's spell-checker, you're not alone! I've had professional writers and editors tell me I was misspelling a word because Word didn't recognize it. That's one for the pet peeves file.