Writing may come naturally to your teen – or it may be a source of frustration or fear! Give yourself and your teen some breathing room to enjoy the writing process using these simple suggestions.
The next time you assign a writing project, show your teen that you’re a good sport by writing your own composition. Then ask him to evaluate your writing. This will give your teen practice in editing as he searches for grammatical or punctuation mistakes. You can also suggest he gives you ideas as to how you can improve your paper. These activities will help him to focus his attention on the details of your composition, and also put these same efforts into gaining a better understanding of how to improve his paper.
If writing does not come easy for you, share this revelation with your teen. This realization – that others find writing to be difficult – may remove some of his reluctance to write. Working on a writing project with your teen can provide an opportunity for the two of you to brainstorm ideas, talk through how best to organize the paper, and give your teen a jump start to approach the writing process with enthusiasm instead of dread.
Here’s a link that provides some ideas for writing prompts. It also provides rubrics for evaluating writing samples and scored examples of essays. Having your teen read through the scored essays can be beneficial as he makes comparisons between the high and low scoring essays.