Sharing the Need for Good Writing Skills

As adults we find need to writing all the time in our personal and occupational lives. We
write notes for our kids to take to school, notes for ourselves about tasks that need to be accomplished, and notes to take to the grocery store so we don’t forget the all-important item a member of our family has requested. We may write e-mails or letters. Perhaps we record our thoughts and feelings in personal journals, or we might work on a family history project. At work we write reports, presentations, or memos.

It seems there is always something that needs to be written. That’s why it’s so surprising to me as a teacher when my students tell me that learning to write is a waste of their time. They insist that they will never use writing once they graduate from high school. For sure, they will never write once they are finished with college. I shake my head and laugh to myself at the wisdom of a fourteen-year-old. They know it all and can make life-choices so much more easily and certainly than I—a teacher of twenty-seven years—can convince them to reconsider.

That’s where parents step into the picture. I cannot stress how important it is that your children see that you use writing in your day-to-day life. No one expects you to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. It’s not necessary to write for the public at all. If you write personal journal entries, you don’t need to let your children read them, just be sure they know you do.

Children model their behaviors, and if we want them to become better writers, they need to understand that there is a need for them to learn to do so beyond the classroom, beyond their educational experience and into the world of being an adult in an ever-changing world. What we know to be true about our educational needs today might not be true tomorrow. As author Stephen R. Covey said in a recent appearance at Noah Webster Academy in Orem, “Now we are moving into the new knowledge-worker age, sometimes called the Information Age. We are just barely beginning to see the impact of this . . . You will see entirely new education models and leadership models come. It is happening now."

Help you child prepare for tomorrow by learning to write better today. Someday they will thank you for it.