Help! My Kid Hates Writing
Turning Struggling Students into Brave Writers
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Help! My Kid Hates Writing
Copyright: Julie Bogart
Published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House
Thank you for preordering my new book Help! My Kid Hates Writing.
Introduction: Writing Makes Cowards of Us All
Writing scares the living daylights out of, well, just about everyone at some point in their life. Ever sent a text and wanted to take it back, immediately? I have. I hate that. I’ve lost sleep in terror that a bold statement I posted online would come back to bite me in the tush when a superior thinker destroyed my argument publicly. Worse, what if that critic notices my its and it’s are mixed up, not because I don’t know better but because my mind, on fire with a virtuous cause, is making a case for my argument faster than my editing brain can keep pace? Does this happen to you too? I knew it.
When the internet was new, my peer group was shocked to discover that the people we thought we knew and liked were, sadly, blockheads. Their writing betrayed them. We had access to their innermost thoughts, and many times, we didn’t like what we found. Suddenly, we all wanted to set each other straight.
You can’t believe the online bloodbaths I witnessed between stay-at-home moms, for instance. They insulted each other over which loving, devoted mother was ruining the planet faster: Pampers parents or cloth-diaper-service subscribers. This was a real debate that led to brutal written attacks. The keyboard warrior was born! In other words, my generation invented trolling—you’re welcome.
What about you? Maybe you screwed up your courage to write a note to your crush in seventh grade: “Do you like me? Check Yes or No.” Maybe you turned in a college paper confident you did a great job, only to earn a disheartening B− for no clear reason. Maybe you’re haunted by a vague fear that someone will discover you don’t know how many c’s and m’s are in the word accommodate (guilty!). When we speak, we get to say “Um” and “That’s not what I meant” and “Sorry, let me try again.” But put what you think in writing, and look out! You’re on the hook for perfect accuracy—from spelling to facts to grammar.
All hail the glorious internet!
Today, the stakes for writing are both lower and higher than ever. They’re lower because we live in a glut of writing. Everyone can write and be published (all hail the glorious internet). Whether you post comments on a news website, compose fan fiction, or write a horticulture Substack with tips for tending ornamentals, readers who share your interests will find and read your writing. You don’t need an agent or traditional publisher to get your words to the marketplace. In fact, in the twenty-first century, more human beings are writing for publication (readers) than in the history of the world. Cue choirs of angels!
On the flip side, the stakes for writing are higher than ever before. Yes, you can reach an audience easily, but for the first time in history, you’ll also get that audience’s immediate reaction to what they think about your qualifications to write about that topic. Everyone is a smug critic of grammar, spelling, punctuation, opinions, and ideas. Public writing sometimes feels like drunken ax-throwing—self-righteous, ill-prepared taunts get flung at the writer, followed by piling on in the form of likes and comments from the crowd. Even bad writers are self-appointed critics of other people’s better writing! It’s infuriating.
And don’t get me started on AI! Or—do get me started. What’s to be done about artificial intelligence whipping up a complete draft of my ideas in seconds, typing the words in real time in front of my eyes, applying the correct formatting with nary a grammatical error before I finish my cup of tea? It’s nearly impossible to “resist the assist” for many of today’s writing tasks—it would be like saying no to calculators or Photoshop. There’s no going back either. Remember when electricity took the world by storm? Lamplighters were destined to lose their livelihoods no matter how much we romanticized candles over light bulbs.
Maybe we’re at the end of an era. Is the physical act of writing our own thoughts destined for the waste bin of history? Like Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, will our students create video essays for their college applications instead of writing them? Will AI take over texting, emailing, and online game chatting, too? Is poetry to be written by robots? Will TV shows, movies, plays, and novels use artificial intelligence to steal writing styles from successful authors rather than hire people to do the job? Never in our history have we successfully built a tool that is creative in the way humans are. Is that what’s happening here?
Honestly, it’s refreshing to see how alarmed everyone is. It shows we value the combination of writing and humanity! We’re literally saying: “The thoughts in my head have to be and are more valuable than what a computer can generate.”
Still, every educator and parent ought to be asking: “Why in the h-e-double-toothpicks should our kids learn to write from scratch when they resent it so much and artificial intelligence can do it for them?” I mean, really! Children and teens tell us all the time how much they hate writing and that they don’t have anything worthwhile to put on the page. These are the wordy protestations of children who can’t manage to jot a thank-you note to grandma for the slick new dirt bike she gave as a birthday gift.
Adults resent writing too! I hear from them all the time. They send me emails quaking in fear that I’m about to judge them for a typo or missed punctuation mark. (I would never! But they don’t know that.) Maybe we need to start by asking ourselves: “Why should we, as parents and educators, bother with the drama and trauma of teaching the art of transcription (jotting down our own thoughts by our own hands) when so many human beings are resistant to the physical act of putting pen to paper, video is everywhere, and AI is on the move?” Great question.
For many grownups, these swift changes feel like the end of an era. We romanticize letters written in someone’s identifiable penmanship. If you’re the family historian who relishes the artifacts of your lineage, you grieve twice. The handwritten journals, photographs, and letters of today are rarely saved in a shoebox. Instead, most of our writing and photography is stored in pixels. As technologies evolve, many of those legacies are being rapidly lost through digital decay. Historians share this sense of loss. Despair for the old paper, parchment, or cave wall ways of writing is real.
Or maybe you’re secretly fist pumping in joy! You’ve been waiting for the end of original writing as a requirement all your life. Digital records are easy to keep and to edit. You’ve got the support of grammar and spell check. You won’t be judged by the grammar snobs. You can stop feeling guilty that you never write thank-you notes, because now you can punch out a text message in thirty seconds flat—or dictate it voice-to-text in even less time. You wonder if you can quit writing from scratch for good and let artificial intelligence do it all. Hurray: writing is over!
Writing isn’t going anywhere
Let’s take a deep collective breath. Writing isn’t going anywhere. Original thought can never be reproduced by a machine. Our deepest sentiments, the joy we find in self-expression, our particular take on an issue—these lie within us and can’t be imitated or discovered by artificial intelligence. Not only that, original writing is still the best tool for education (that is, developing as a thinker) and is essential in all kinds of careers. Just because AI can generate raw copy doesn’t mean that it can tell the stories in your child’s imagination or analyze the meaning of texts the way they strike your teenager.
Consider this era the dawn of truly remarkable breakthroughs in writing. Will there be liabilities and doomsday predictions about the end of civilization? Yes. Most reasonable people are worried about plagiarism, copyright violations, and students not turning in their own written work. But even college students in the 1950s, armed with mere fountain pens, paid their roommates to write their history papers. (A career lawyer I know confessed to this very practice. Mind blown!) Where there’s a will not to write from scratch, there’s always been a way.
The difference today is that we can opt out of writing (and thinking!) more easily than ever. Since that is the case, the question before us really is: Why write? The answer can’t be to get into college, to hold a job, or to prove to Grandma that you understand the rules of etiquette. The importance of writing is more fundamental. Why did people make intentional, meaningful markings on the cave walls of Lascaux, France, 57,000 years ago? Why have human beings created entire alphabets and symbolic systems to convey their thoughts? Why are we swept into delirium at the sight of the Beast’s library when he shows it to Belle?
There’s a reason, and it’s pretty simple, actually. Human beings are communicators at their core. They want to know each other. Writing invites us inside someone else’s mind and preserves those thoughts—humans find that experience irresistible. With one voice, writers declare: “What I have to say is worth safeguarding and reading.” And readers everywhere say: “Thank you. I wanted to know!”
It’s this primal impulse to get our thought lives out into the sunshine that makes writing vibrate with power. We write to know ourselves and we read to know one another. Language itself is fantastical—it evokes a host of pleasures from emotion to insight to perspective. We are drawn in by its sounds and called forward by the way it connects us to one another.
Weirdly, your kids already understand this principle even before they learn to read. Have you ever heard a small child get into a rhyming riot, where they string together as many rhyming words as they can, even inventing new ones just to keep the scheme going? Giggle, wiggle, piggle, biggle, fliggle, triggle, jiggle, besmiggle! The playfulness of the words, the sounds, the body sensations are all a part of the utter fascination that is the birthright of every human being. We love wordplay, communication, and the call and response of language. Put those words on paper and look out! Kids already know that writing means: My thoughts, in those markings, matter. A writer has a transcendent experience: There I am, outside of my skin, on a surface, shared with readers.
Here’s my bold claim: Writing is for writers first, readers second.
I’m reminded of a powerful moment early in my writing-instruction career. A ten-year-old student in one of our Brave Writer writing classes, whom I’ll call Gary, had a rare disease that required daily growth hormones. Every day, the boy’s father injected an extremely painful shot into his stomach. Gary’s mother told the instructor that her son hated the shot and that she felt utterly unable to help him process this traumatic, necessary experience that went on day after day. In our classes, we teach students how to freewrite—how to let the thoughts in your mind flow down through your arm so the words pour out of your hand onto the page. The only rule: keep the pencil moving.
We suggest the parent guide the child by telling them that they can write whatever comes to mind, even if it seems like the wrong thing to say. For instance, some kids will write, “I hate this. When can I stop writing?” We say: “Yes, that counts!” And so, this sweet boy took his mother’s instructions to heart and did just that—he wrote his real thoughts, without regard to spelling, punctuation, grammar, or even worrying about who might read his writing.
Permission to be honest
The first line of Gary’s first freewrite attacked his father with an expletive and accused him of hating all children. Gary’s rage spilled all over the page unedited, the way it lived inside of him. His caring mother held space for this hard-to-read journey as her son wrote three times in a period of days on the same topic: how much he hated the injections delivered by his father. In his third freewrite, however, Gary softened.
He began with this line: “My dad is usually a nice guy, but at the point when he was giving me the shot, I felt like he was someone who liked giving kids pain.” Note the way Gary’s perspective expanded and became less self-oriented after he gave himself permission to express a private forbidden thought first. There’s research that shows that writing four freewrites of fifteen minutes each over the course of four days about a distressing or traumatic event will provide an enormous amount of healing to the writer on par with therapy! It was incredible to see this exact process in action in our classes.
This is one of the powerful reasons human beings write, and it’s why helping children learn to do it themselves is both a moral obligation and a privilege. Writing lets us externalize what’s inside, putting it into language, making it a “thing out there” rather than a complicated, hidden “thing in here.” We get off track quickly if we teach writing as a performance for teachers or to impress readers. From where I sit, we write not just to convey an idea to another person (which is an important goal), but first to know and value our own thoughts and experiences.
The only person in the entire world who thinks your thoughts is you. In school, kids miss that memo. They think the thoughts they’re supposed to write live in the teacher’s mind or in a book they should emulate (or inside ChatGPT). Yet when a person realizes the amazing capacity their brain has to generate ideas, insights, descriptions, stories, and analyses, writing takes on an entirely different dimension! It becomes important personally. I like to say about my company, Brave Writer, that we teach writers, not writing. The human being is the conduit of written language—not the assignment, not the information, not even the proper mechanics. Artificial intelligence can never provide the moving, rings-true content that a specific human being can. Until our kids understand that the ideas that live in them are valuable and unique, writing will continue to be a source of irritation and black magic—an incantation they need to conjure to sound “right” to the teacher-reader, rather than true to the self.
People who write for a living (academics, novelists, journalists, researchers, memoirists, physicists, and more) agree that writing clarifies thinking in ways thought alone never can. I can think an amazing thought in the shower that falls to pieces when I towel off and start typing it onto a screen. Every time, writing shows me what I don’t quite understand well enough yet. But writing also shows me what I am afraid to face or reveal. Sometimes writing shows me something I didn’t think until the moment my hand made the move. Writing is a means for externalizing the self. In putting that self at arm’s length (quite literally—the distance of an arm to a page or screen), we get a different view of ourselves. As my writing mentor, Dr. Peter Elbow, says: “Writing helps us stand outside ourselves.” (Teaching Thinking by Writing, 1983).
Writing helps us stand outside ourselves.
A reason to raise writers is so that our kids have the sheer joy of standing outside themselves to know their minds, their feelings, and their experiences with a little critical distance. When they write, they give value and weight to the essence of who they are. In the last thirty years of online communication, it’s become obvious to me that kids love to write for that very reason! They’ll sneak a cell phone to bed so they can text all night long. They happily type into a chat for hours while gaming. They design social media pages, and before that, they created online diaries, emptying their hearts to that imagined audience of peers. They write scripts for short videos and podcasts.
In truth, they can think of no better way to spend their time. They see writing as a tool for both self-expression and powerful communication with readers/viewers/listeners they value. From the moment the internet threw open its doors, kids everywhere clamored for a space to fill with their passions, interests, and curiosities—and they used writing to do it!
Of course, most kids balk at the kind of writing school requires. Let’s be real. Only “nerds” get excited about writing a compare-and-contrast essay for a single reader (a teacher) who’s going to mark it up, note all its flaws, and then assign it a grade. What an awful system for learning to write. It’s like learning to play the piano simply so a teacher can tell you all the notes you missed while no one else gets to enjoy the music you make.
The point of this book, then, is to strengthen your young writers so that writing becomes meaningful to them in the following ways:
They know themselves better.
They clarify and expand their thinking.
They delight in language.
They communicate effectively with readers.
They face a blank page or screen with confidence.
They perform writing tasks for school and their careers with competence.
They discover the power of writing for themselves, beyond school settings.
They write that thank-you note to your mom!
Many adults have bad memories of writing in school. You may discover as you read this book that you’re healing the damaged writer that lives in you, too. I’ve spoken to thousands of adults at conferences for three decades. It’s startling to see how many grownups (by my guesstimate, a good 75 to 80 percent) still feel intimidated by writing, even after twelve, sixteen, eighteen years of schooling.
The education establishment is not doing a good job of releasing the writers within us. We feel tethered to the performance metrics of school and never quite shed them. Unfortunately, the way writing is usually taught to kids creates untold stress and even, yes, damage. We’ll look at how that damage gets created and what to do to both heal and prevent it going forward. In fact, it’s pretty easy to throw off the weight of all that critique once you have a better sense of how the writing journey can unfold for your kids and for you!
By the way, I’m not here to give you an academic peer-reviewed study of how kids learn to write in school. Dozens of articles online tell that story.
Rather, I want to share with you what happens when we treat children as wise, capable, and insightful people while teaching them to write.
I put their raw emotions and delightful idiosyncrasies at the center of my writing pedagogy. The students I want to help are children—those playful, precocious, quirky beings who become the stars of every conversation because their way of speaking and thinking is so wildly original. These are kids of parents and caregivers—adults—who want to create the best conditions for their children to become not only competent writers and thinkers but also, eventually, grownups who can face a blank screen without having a panic attack.
Wouldn’t it be beautiful if your kids knew how to use writing to clarify their own thoughts or to persuade a resistant audience? Someday they may want to write their own wedding vows or journal when they have troubling thoughts. Let’s give them that gift! Once they know writing is within their power, the writing tasks for school become much easier to tackle, too.
This book is divided into eleven chapters. Each chapter addresses an aspect of what it means to grow as a writer. What sets this book apart from a writing curriculum is that it teaches you, the adult, what your crucial role is in that journey.
It has been the joy of my lifetime to promote this generous, sensitive, and effective method for raising writers. It’s my hope and wish that we would transform the way writing is taught to kids, especially now in the era of Generative Artificial Intelligence.
If this is your wish too, please order my book! Let’s amplify this message and rescue kids from the drama and trauma of poor writing instruction. They deserve better.
xo Julie
Preorder my new book Help! My Kid Hates Writing. Thank you!