Teaching Your Child to Write

Teaching the Basics of a Formal Essay

Jul 29, 2008

Formal writing is not a talent, but a skill. Children are not born with the ability to write. However, almost any child can be taught to write logically and clearly.

The key is to teach your child to write a clear paragraph in a few simple steps. Train your student to create a clear question, concisely outline, and write an essay through a series of drafts.

Formulate a Question

The first step to writing a paragraph is formulating a question. Help your child come up with one. A few examples are:

Avoid questions such as “Why is stealing wrong?” Such questions are too broad and answering them quickly becomes overwhelming.

Outlining Skills

Next, your child should create an outline. The outline should include five points. Encourage your child to write short phrases, not sentences, at this stage. The introduction should clearly introduce the topic. The three main points should provide the answer to the question or discuss three aspects of the question. The conclusion should be the answer to the question clearly stated.

Now your child should have written something like the following example paragraph:

Rough Draft

Now, help your child formulate a rough draft. He or she should turn each phrase into a sentence. Each sentence does not need to be perfect. At this stage, it is important to refrain from adding new points or ideas, which will sidetrack the paragraph. Now you should have something like the following example sentence:

I liked The Swiss Family Robinson. The family had incredible adventures. They lived in a tree. They owned an elephant. They lived well without modern conveniences.

Final Draft

Now it is time to write the final draft. Ask your child to read his paragraph out loud to you. As he reads, help him listen for awkward sentence structure, simplistic vocabulary, grammatical errors or murky phrasing. Have your child re-write the paragraph, fixing any mistakes. It should now look similar to the following example paragraph:

I liked the book The Swiss Family Robinson. The family in the story had incredible adventures together. They lived in a tree-house. They captured and tamed an elephant. As the Robinsons lived on the jungle island, they learned to live well without modern conveniences.

Encourage your child to practice writing question, outlines, and paragraphs often. Once your child understands these concepts, he or she will easily transition into writing longer pieces. Clear questions, outlining, and drafting are the basic building blocks of a formal essay. As rudimentary as they seem, they will lay the foundation for a lifetime of excellent writing.

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