Words, Words, Words: Why (and How) to Teach Writing

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Teaching writing is an essential skill for homeschoolers, helping students develop clear communication and clear thinking, as well as creative expression. In today’s guest post by Olivia Marstall (homeschool graduate, writer, and writing teacher), she shares her journey from a passionate writer to a thoughtful educator, exploring the purpose and art of teaching writing and offering practical advice for homeschooling parents. Discover how to nurture a love for words in your homeschool and equip your students with the tools they need to succeed in writing and beyond.

Words, Words, Words: Why (and How) to Teach Writing homeschooling

Words, Words, Words
Why (and How) to Teach Writing
By Olivia Marstall

I think a lot about writing. When I was seven, I decided to be a “capital W” Writer and have filled dozens of notebooks since. In high school, I burned through books and websites and podcasts on writing; I wrote stories and poetry and essays and ran a blog for a brief period. In college, I wrote countless academic essays, a few poetry chapbooks, and a collection of familiar essays; I also founded and served as the editor-in-chief of a student art journal. Now, I write and think about writing more than ever, juggling a weekly Substack, a first draft of a novel, and still the occasional poem or essay. But this summer, my approach to writing changed. Before, I had one writer to teach: myself. Now, with writing classes and tutoring on the horizon, I’m forced to ask a new question––not just “How do I learn to write well?” but “How do I teach writing?”

Table Of Contents

Why teach writing?
What is the Art of Writing?
Writing, Thinking, and the Exchange of Ideas
Purpose of Teaching Writing
What are the best ways to teach writing?
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Olivia's Writing Tutoring Services

Why teach writing?

In order to answer that question, I had to ask another: why teach writing? Why does it matter that I—that we—teach students to write well? One answer might be: I need to teach a student how to write a strong academic essay, so they can do well in their high school and college courses and graduate with a good G.P.A. That’s one possible goal of a writing instructor.

But why spend twelve grades teaching a skill that a student may only need for a handful of high school and college courses? If a student knows basic grammar, a freshman composition course can teach him or her how to write an academic essay in a semester.

Is there a reason to teach writing beyond the practical goal of passing high school or college? Generally, we think of writing in two categories, academic or creative: the college essay, the PhD thesis, and the research paper or the Next Great American novel. But what about the student who won’t pursue higher academics or scientific research, the student who doesn’t want to be a novelist or poet, the mechanic or engineer or data analyst?

If a job field requires writing—legal or medical or financial—the type of writing is often technical and specialized. Should we teach all students technical writing for every field? Or is there a universal value to the art of writing and a universal approach to teaching it? For parents, these can be hard questions to answer. In the search for financial stability or security for the future, the art of writing, like the fine arts and the liberal arts, seems hard to justify.

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What is the Art of Writing?

To answer these questions, let’s reevaluate what we mean by “art.” Usually we think of “art” as the realm of creatives, as in the fine arts, or as the study of philosophy and literature—liberal arts—perhaps in contrast with science. Compare this with the Greek definitions. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle called art “the capacity to make [something], involving a true course of reasoning” (1140a.31) and science “the capacity to demonstrate” (1130b.10).

Following Aristotle, late antiquity and medieval writers like Augustine, Boethius, and Thomas Aquinas distinguished between “science” as any body of knowledge and “art” as the tools with which we put knowledge into practice. These writers described the science and the art of medicine, the knowledge and the practice of it.

Add into this etymological mix the original sense of the word “artist”—artifex—which signifies simply “a maker.” These two facets, scientia and ars, knowing and making, describe what it means to be human, created in the image of God. Man is rational and creative, sapiens et artifex, and these two faculties distinguish him from the beasts. A bee does not build a beehive in the same way that a man builds a house; the bee acts by instinct, whereas man plans and works with his rational and creative faculties, problem-solving, revising, analyzing.

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Writing, Thinking, and the Exchange of Ideas

Writing engages both the rational and creative faculties of man. We have yet to invent a better medium for the communication of ideas. Even in oral cultures with a refined system of rhetoric and mnemonic devices, like the Roman rhetoric that Cicero and Augustine mastered, one still had to be present for a speech in order to hear an idea introduced and debated. In contrast, writing allows readers in any time or place to encounter an idea and respond.

On the written page, a reader can follow an argument through multiplying premises and arrive at its conclusion, able to refer back to earlier threads with ease. Just as in Euclidean geometry the more complicated propositions rely on earlier problems to prove each premise, building on layers of logical cause-and-effect with the shorthand—“See Prop VI”, “Prop VII,” etc.—so in writing we can follow more complicated arguments to their conclusions, because the mind and the eye of the reader can constantly refer back to previous ideas.

But unlike the formal techniques of Roman rhetoric, only taught and practiced by a class of master orators, writing invites anyone who can read into the exchange of ideas.

Consider how writing has created explosion after explosion of ideas throughout history: philosophy finding its footing with Plato’s dialogues and notes from Aristotle’s students; the poetry of Vergil shaping the Roman mythos; the theologians of the early Church defending against heresy with the tools of logic and Scripture; the monks who labored in scriptoriums to preserve culture against the barbarian invasions, the recovery of Greco-Roman sources in the Renaissance; the printing press and then the pamphlets and newspapers and essays that dominated the eighteenth century as politicians debated in print and revolutions sparked; the refusal of slave owners to teach African men and women to read and Booker T. Washington’s escape from slavery—both of the body and the mind—through the power of the written word; and then in the twentieth century, the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, Churchill’s speeches, C. S. Lewis’ broadcasts—words, words, words, and the clash of minds.

Suffice to say: to write is human, because to think is human. Writing shapes the mind’s thoughts in a way no other medium does, tracing connections and logical cause-and-effect between ideas. When I spend time reading and writing, my mind more easily thinks what Frederic Buechner called “the long thoughts” more easily than when I’ve been scrolling Instagram. In seasons where I write often, I can follow an argument, attend to a sermon, or listen to someone talk without my attention darting in flashes from one thing to another.

The act of writing teaches the mind to feel comfortable with slowness, with connections and ideas that take time to articulate, because it takes time to put words on a page, even as the mind races ahead. But once written, once expressed in the words of the writer, the ideas cement. (Look up Feynman’s Technique: we don’t know anything until we’ve said it in our own words.)

Purpose of Teaching Writing

So why do we need to teach writing? To help students grow into well-rounded people, into men and women who are wise, thoughtful, and discerning, who can analyze an argument, tapping it from all sides to see if it rings true, who are comfortable thinking “the long thoughts”, not blown around by distraction and the itch for instant gratification, who express themselves clearly and, in the struggle to find the right words, polish their ideas to crystal purity.

Flannery O’Connor once said: “I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say.” We write in order to know what we think, and a society whose citizens know their own minds, the minds of others, and how to exchange ideas with reason and not violence, cannot have wasted its time. Therefore, we need to teach students to write.

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What are the best ways to teach writing?

So how do we go about it?

Teach grammar. To play music, a violinist must know his instrument; to paint a masterpiece, an artist must learn the techniques of color and texture. The writer’s toolbox contains words, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation, parts of speech. It is not enough to avoid run-on sentences or stacks of adjectives. Can your student write a 300 word sentence that keeps a clear flow of ideas, without fluff? Do they know when to use a semicolon, an em dash, or a period, and how each punctuation mark affects the words around it? Writing is wordcraft and grammar its foundation.
Make your student read widely. In The Art of Writing Fiction, John Gardner writes that when a writing instructor teaches technique, he merely gives a name to what intuition teaches the student as he reads the great masters. So have your students read satire, read essays, read novels, read political speeches and poetry and philosophy; in every genre, the student finds masters of wordcraft, and from them, more than from any instructor, he learns the trade of writing.
Practice imitation. “Write an essay in the style of G. K. Chesterton”, “a speech in the style of George Washington”, “a poem like Longfellow”, and so on. All students naturally imitate the authors they like; this is a good thing, for by examining how an author handles a technique, they sharpen their own particular gifts. By imitating different authors, the student writer also grasps the essentials of good writing and the array of tools at his disposal.
Have them write poetry. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his Cambridge lectures on writing, argued that all students ought to write verse, if only because it teaches concision, imagery, and the importance of connotation, sound, and rhythm when choosing words. For similar reasons, make them write short stories to learn narrative and description. Poetry and fiction also remind the student writer that words do not exist only for argument and that the mind knows ideas through imagery and story as well as logic.
Encourage unique gifts. Every writer has their own particular gifts—sharp description, maybe, or logical clarity, or a knack for sentence rhythm. (Imitation can show a student these strengths.) The writing instructor notes these things, praises them, and helps the student learn the techniques they need to strengthen weaker areas.
Teach students how to edit their own work. All writing is rewriting. It’s hard to look with clear eyes at your own work, take a deep breath, and start from the top—over and over again—but nobody writes a perfect first draft. So teach students how to revise their work.
Lastly, a word on the academic essay. An academic essay is one genre among many. If a student has learned to think clearly and write clearly, he only needs to arrange pieces in a particular way to construct “the five paragraph essay.” But there are a few tools that can make academic writing easier. First, have students write timed essays, both short and long answer. The time restriction trains a student to frame a question, choose a position, and defend it without worrying about whether he or she has chosen the perfect topic. This helps a student to invent a strong thesis with confidence and ease; and a good thesis is the center of a good academic essay. Secondly, have your student read well-written, scholarly essays. Just as reading poetry builds an ear for poetic rhythm, reading academic essays helps a student understand how to write theses, use sources, and develop strong arguments. If there are well-known essays in a particular genre (e.g., T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare), start there.

Take these suggestions with a grain of salt. What matters is that your student reads broadly and respects words; all other writing instruction sharpens and enhances these two traits.

How do we teach writing? At the end of the day, my best answer is that we invite others into the love of words. I believe that we foster this love by teaching students to view writing not as a formula or a formidable mystery, but as a craft, with tools and techniques that can be taught and mastered, and ultimately, as an act that belongs to all of us as humans, rational and creative, sapiens et artifex.

Olivia Marstall is a writer and writing tutor from the Nashville area. She offers one-on-one tutoring in academic and creative writing. She believes that writing is a craft and, like any craft, its tools and techniques can be taught and mastered. Her own study of the written word will never end, but over the years she’s learned a few of these tools and she’d love to teach them to you or your student.

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Olivia’s Writing Tutoring Services

About my tutoring services:

I offer one-on-one tutoring in academic and creative writing. I believe that writing is a craft and, like any craft, its tools and techniques can be taught and mastered. My own study of the written word will never end, but over the years I’ve learned a few of these tools and I’d love to teach them to you or your student.

A few credentials:

“Olivia Marstall is the most gifted writer I’ve had the pleasure of teaching in my 10 years as a classical educator and writing teacher. She knows the craft of writing down to its bones…She has a keen eye for excellence in writing and a dedication to the process and craft of writing from start to finish. Best of all, she practices what she teaches. If you or your child need a writing tutor, I couldn’t recommend anyone more!” – Nathan Johnson, Assistant Dean of Academics at New College Franklin and Interim Executive Director of the Davenant Institute

“Olivia Marstall is a talented writer with a keen eye for craft and content. She pays careful attention to style, expression, clarity and content. She knows how to successfully structure a strong essay, conduct scholarly research, create a compelling argument, cite sources, edit carefully and professionally format and polish academic work. She brings a passion for argument and for clear communication to the page, and would inspire in her students a lifelong love for learning and an ability to write well that will serve them in any area of study they wish to pursue. I would gladly and gratefully have Miss Marstall teach or tutor any of my own children in a heartbeat!” – Dr. Carolyn Weber, Professor of Trivium Studies at New College Franklin

Sessions:

Academic writing
For middle school to high school students. Exact content for each session will be determined on a case-by-case basis, depending on the student’s needs. Content could include: the basics of sentence and paragraph structure, discussion of academic style and voice, or instruction in how to formulate and research a thesis, structure an essay, and revise content and form.

Creative writing
For students or aspiring writers looking for feedback and creative writing instruction. I’ve studied poetry, short story, creative nonfiction, and novel writing, and I’m happy to teach any of these genres or offer suggestions on an ongoing project.

Payment and availability:

$75 per session. If you’d like to register multiple students for a session, it’ll cost $15 per each additional student.
Sessions are one hour via Zoom, weekly or biweekly
Time slots: During the summer, time slots are available from 9am-6pm on Saturdays. During the 2024 fall semester, time slots are available from 2pm-6pm Tuesday/Thursday and from 9am-6pm Fridays and Saturdays. Spring semester time slots will be available by mid December 2024.
Payment: payment for total number of sessions due in full, up front. Payment due by semester. Sessions can be added at any time. Unused sessions will not carry over into the following semester. Sessions can be booked as a time slot for an entire semester or on a case-by-case basis, but no later than two weeks in advance.
Questions? Schedule a free thirty minute meeting here and let’s talk! If you’re interested in registering a student, please schedule a thirty minute consultation first, so I can learn about your student and tailor our sessions to their specific needs.