Writing in School

I am totally the black sheep of the family, I am all about math and my dad is a writer, my stepmom is an English teacher, my sister has a degree in journalism and so on. So with my background one would expect me to at least appreciate writing and I do, when other people do it that is. I feel like I will always hate writing.

So I wondered, why do I hate writing so much? And why do other people hate writing so much? I came to the conclusion that I was probably not taught well enough in elementary school. I have absolutely terrible grammar and I can’t spell very well. Those things can certainly be corrected later in school, but they weren’t for me. So now I am a terrible writer and I don’t care enough about it to correct it at this point in time.

My issues with writing are most likely because of bad teaching, but I feel like even if I went to a better school and was taught well I still might not like writing. This brings me to the point that I am trying to make: writing should be taught differently in school.

Things shouldn’t be drastically changed, but I feel like more explanation should be involved. Like instead of just teaching grammar the teacher should explain why we need to be grammatically correct; because we want a reader to know exactly what we mean when we write something because most of the time the author won’t be there to explain it. And page requirements should be explained too, like “I want to you to go in a lot of depth with this paper so it needs to be about blank number of pages.” If students were able to see the reasons why they are given particular assignments, besides just getting a grade, I think they would do things more willingly and therefore put more effort into it.

I feel like if I was taught some of these explanations when I was younger instead of realizing them as an adult I would have become a better writer and wouldn’t have complained incessantly throughout my school career about writing papers. Do you think that an explanation of why we do things in school would have helped you be a better student? I feel like students then wouldn’t think that teachers give them assignments just to torture them like I thought.

Something Help You Write a Children’s Book

As I was surfing online looking at something about how to write a children’s book. The
question comes back to what the theme should authors put into a children’s book, what can be written in the story, and more important, what can catch people’s eyes.
What I learned from http://www.creativejuicesbooks.com/index.html, to write a book you need to chose your target audience first. As in children’s literature, the audience will be children. However, age group should also be specified, for example, babies, toddlers, preschoolers, elementary kids and so on. And the website gives more examples focusing on kids under the link http://www.creativejuicesbooks.com/creative-writing-ideas-kids.html. What’s more, gender does matter as well. Caitlin S. pointed out in her blog that it would be beneficial to provide kids
“girls books” and “boys books” so that they can find reference as they growing up.
Next you will need to think about what your reader want to read. Find out what kind of books, what books are popular with your target readers. And then ask yourself what aspect causes that book t catch readers’ eyes. Once you get the example books, google them and go over the book reviews. They will help you get more ideas about the book.
After you have a general idea of which direction you should write to, you will need a spark, a flash of inspiration. Just observing what’s around you, think deeper, brain storm and write down every spark that comes into your mind. And then things come much easier. Choosing a proper theme for your target audience and write the outline. Researches and References will also help a lot while writing a book.
And this has very much to do with what we've been learning in this class so far. The way we are learning about how to analyize a book is almost exactly how you would have to take into consideration when you get a chance to write our own. I don't know about you guys, but this kind of motivates me to thinking about writing a children's book myself sometime in the future.