Welcome back to this series about ways to prepare for a stellar high school writing career! If you haven’t read the first entry in this series, be sure to check that out first for more tips like these.
Do not neglect creative writing skills
While sometimes portrayed as nonfiction’s whimsical cousin, creative writing actually serves several unique purposes for writers. The first and most obvious is that it just tends to be more fun for most people. If students find ways to like writing, they will do more of it and get more practice. In the end, any kind of writing practice will help improve their written work overall. Secondly, creative writing helps students develop their voice, which is an essential element to writing that allows them to appeal to their reader’s senses as a fellow human being, and makes their writing more relatable. This is especially important for writing cover letters, cards to loved ones and admissions essays.
Pay attention to the type of writing
By the time students get to high school, they are expected to have mastered the basics of several writing styles. For example, persuasive writing requires factual evidence to persuade the reader, but narrative writing typically requires no evidence. Be sure you are familiar with the distinctions between these.
- Persuasive: this style of writing is the presentation of an argument by the author and sometimes includes their personal opinion. Advertisements and movie reviews are examples.
- Descriptive: as you may have guessed, this style of writing relates to when a writing is describing something in extensive detail. Research papers and journals are examples.
- Narrative: this style refers to storytelling with the use of characters and plot. Novels and short stories are examples.
- Expository: this style is for the presentation of facts without the author’s personal opinion. Newspapers and textbooks are examples.
Learn the resources that are available
There are numerous free resources available online or from their school that drastically improve productivity. Word processing applications like Microsoft Word have spell check, annotation, and grammar tools embedded in its interface. Easybib enables students to write citations without fretting over the formulaic rigidity of formatting. Databases like Google Scholar and JSTOR contain vast repositories of free documents that are certified, reliable sources of information. Students just need to know what is available and then they can save a lot of time and contentment.
I hope these tips help you get an idea of what to expect of writing classes in high school and beyond. If you or someone you know needs help developing any of the aforementioned skills, we at University Tutoring can certainly help along the way. Writing will always be an essential skill and everyone deserves to feel comfortable during the writing process.