Just how important are spelling and punctuation anyway?

This is the last of our series on writing voice.

Some parents find it hard to believe that it's possible to nurture a child’s writing voice without worrying about the mechanics of writing. They wonder if they're fostering a carelessness in their children’s writing habits. Shouldn’t they learn to care about how they:

• spell,

• punctuate,

• and construct sentences and paragraphs?

Isn’t attentiveness to the form as important as attentiveness to the content?

It’s true that meticulous care about mechanics is a final step in every writing process. When students in high school turn in papers to me, I always tell them that to make sure their work is error free. They have spell-check, parents, friends—all who can lend support to finding spelling errors, missed punctuation, and typos.

The presentation of the final paper is a psychologically important part of grading a paper, in fact. A teacher, parent, or professor is put at ease when the writing is without error. The mechanical perfection of the paper renders the form invisible and frees the reader to focus exclusively on content—the essence of writing. What a joy that is!

So yes, mechanics matter a lot in writing and there’s nothing at all wrong with expecting a high standard in the final product. Far be it from me to ever have associated with my name a carelessness about how the final paper is presented!

On the other hand…

There is a peculiar challenge in writing, however. To find one’s meaning, to explore and excavate one’s ideas, requires letting go of the wheel.

It’s hard to focus on the end marks and spellings when your inner eye is trained on an idea and where it is going. For your kids, who are even less skilled as writers, it’s even harder for them to pat their stomachs and rub their heads simultaneously. They haven’t got years of writing and reading under their belts. The conventions of punctuation aren’t automatic for them. To write “correctly” requires effort and attentiveness.

If they focus on how to put their ideas on paper,
they lose touch with what they want to say.

The quickest way to kill a writer’s inspiration is to ask him or her to think about how to write before the writer has thought about what to write.

Start with their:

• ideas,

• images,

• thoughts,

• fantasies.

Later, once all that mess is on the page or screen, it’s possible to shift gears and give full attention to editing. In fact, it’s surprisingly satisfying to clean up the mess of creativity once the content is written. Editing is relaxing in the way that mowing the lawn or ironing a wrinkled shirt is. You see progress instantly!

So save mechanics instruction for copywork, dictation, and other people’s writing (our language arts programs are great for this).

And for those who like more structure, we suggest using a dedicated program only once in elementary school, once in junior high, and a foreign language in high school.

In the meantime:

While you're growing a young writer, give full attention to what that writer wants to say and how he or she wants to say it.

• Mess with meanings.

• Play with words.

• Wriggle around in disorder and creativity.

Then, once the words are all over the page in their glorious chaotic sense, impose a little order by editing for spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

That’s the best (and I daresay, only) way to cultivate writing voice while giving some attention to the mechanics of writing.

And don’t forget to preorder my new book Help! My Kid Hates Writing.
Comes out April 15.