✨Teaching Writing Isn’t Enough
How to Teach Kids the Most Important Skill in Writing: Synthesis
This week I’m giving my children some extra love & attention during our spring break, so today’s post is pulled from the ClarifiEd archives. If you’re new here, I hope it’s helpful. And if you’ve read it before, it might land differently this time. Happy Spring to you all♥️
The 5 paragraph essay is treated as the pinnacle of writing instruction. But does it deserve it?
I spent more than a decade reading 20-year-olds’ writing as a university professor, and I can tell you the problem wasn’t that they couldn’t write a 5 paragraph essay. It was they couldn’t formulate their own thoughts, much less communicate them.
College students’ writing looked like strung together sentences generally about the right topic, but that never actually said anything. In retrospect, they wrote like early versions of chatGPT.
So when 10 year old my daughter started pushing back against her writing program’s 5 paragraph essays, I had to ask: Is this really the best way way to cultivate strong, confident writers?
Do I want my child to be able to write a 5 paragraph essay or do I want her to be able to write anything?
The answer is obvious, so let me be more explicit.
I want my children to be able to express themselves clearly and with conviction—to take an idea, break it down, and rebuild it in a way that is coherent and resonates with others.
This is the heart of exceptional writing. This is synthesis.
The average writer may be able to summarize a book or article, but an exceptional writer can distill its essence, identify the core ideas, and strip away the irrelevant.
Teaching my children to synthesize has transformed their writing, not because their formatting is better but because their thinking is better.
The problem? It takes years to become an exceptional synthesizer. So, the question you should be asking is…
Where do I start? What can I do TODAY to begin my child’s journey to exceptional writing?
In today’s post you will…
Learn a Simple Strategy to Teach Synthesis: A fun activity that helps your kids distill and reconstruct complex ideas across any subject - history, science, literature.
Sharpen Your Child’s Critical Thinking: This technique extends beyond writing. It enhances note-taking, problem-solving, and expression skills.
Resource Recommendation: I also give you my favorite resource with a full year of activities for those who prefer a formal program.
Joining our community of thousands of parents also gives you access to posts like The Four Stories Your Kids Need to Read Everything Else, Curate a Love for Classical Music in Your Children, and my You Can Homeschool course.