Ask a college professor. Most incoming college freshmen can't write, because they got precious little practice in high school.  My suggestion: Get your teenager in a high school journalism class.

We often focus our attention on preparing kids for college on their math skills, knowledge of historical facts, and understanding of scientific principles. This is fine for preparing our kids for taking multiple choice exams, but what about writing?

Most teen "writing" is done via smart phone

Writing 140-character tweets, or text messages in sentence fragments that consist mosly of abbreviations, internet slang, and banalities is not exactly good writing practice.  Note-taking in high school is often minimal.  Writing is frequently limited to research projects.  This is simply insufficient. computer writing

The fundamentals of writing (how to write a five paragraph essay) can be taught and are not difficult to master.  The "hamburger" model; "Bing, bang, bongo"; etc.  But this is like learning the multiplication table; necessary but insufficient for real college success.  

Just as in sports, the only way to get really good at writing is to write.  Often.  And, unless your child is in AP English or Social Studies classes, they probably aren't going to get much real practice.

There may well be great benefit in using social media in the classroom, but to learn how to write in an academic manner, that will lead to success in college, a student needs to actually do it.  Frequently.

Advantages of journalism class

So I recommend you get your child, when at all possible, into a journalism class in high school.  Working on the school newspaper or yearbook forces them to write, frequently, clearly, and on deadline.

I recall a journalism teacher, Mrs. Curnutt, actually taking a pencil out of my hand to force me to compose at the keyboard (then it was a typewriter. LOL.)  Both the almost constant writing, and the requirement to do all my writing on a keyboard, made journalism invaluable to my ability to write well.

And my ability to write well saved my behind in more than one class where I was struggling but wrote my way into a higher grade than maybe I deserved. 

As a student learns to write in a journalistic style, they are forced:

  • to identify the most important information and place it right up front ("in the lead" in journalism jargon)
  • to prioritize everything else and discuss it in descending order of importance
  • to utilize active verbs and avoid repetitive word-usage
  • to write succinctly, clearly, and concisely, with a minimum of complex, compound sentences
  • to write quickly on topics not necessarily of their choosing.

We can easily over-estimate the importance of raw information to the future success of our college-bound child, and neglect the importance of writing clearly, succinctly, on topic, on deadline, and on demand.

Photo: Merete Veian, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0