WRITING SKILLS I LEARNED IN SCHOOL THAT MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN MY TEACHING (AND STILL MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN MY WRITING)

If you've been following this blog or my Instagram posts, you might have gleaned that I'm pretty passionate about all things writing. This passion started at an early age, and my love of books and stories has continued to blossom and grow as I do. But! That growth would have been much less achievable if it weren't for some pretty huge fundamental groundwork I had to lay first, and it all started in high school.

To be honest, I don't remember much about my English classes in middle school or elementary school. I remember reading Island of the Blue Dolphins and Over the Mountain in fifth grade, but I moved around so much that all those years of schooling (and the curriculum being in different places in each school I attended) that those years tend to blend together in my memory.

However, once I got to high school, things settled down a bit; and I was able to attend all three years of high school (I graduated my junior year, so I didn't get that last year), and I learned a TON about domain specifics in each of my classes. 

Particularly, I learned a lot about language and story structure in my English classes. I kind of gravitated to English naturally, as I already had a passion for reading and writing; but I was able to learn some really cool things that I was able to use as I went through college, started teaching English, and even took into my own writing career. I'd like to share some of those things with you today.

1. Structure
When kids (and adults) learn they have to write a paper that's however many pages long, they often freeze up, so intimidated by the length or the topic that they struggle to even get a single word on the page, let alone get their creative ideas flowing. I was the same way for a while, especially in my early schooling years. However, as I studied the requirements for the papers I had to write in high school, I really started to pay attention to the formulas that all writing has.

I learned a way to focus first on the skeletal structure for my papers (or stories), which freed up a lot of mental load for me to then begin generating ideas and enriching my papers and stories.

Doing the same thing for my stories helps keep me from getting stuck in my drafts. I addressed this idea a bit with plot structure in one of my recent posts, but I really do fall back on the structure of my story when I feel stuck. I think... Okay, my character has just gone through their ordeal and are now on the other side of it. I need to start getting things toward the end. What is my falling action going to look like? 

One truly amazing thing about really familiarizing myself with structure as a guide to allow creative flow to happen was that I was able to teach my students these structures. Doing so, in turn, allowed them to create beautiful, well crafted papers with citations, or stories with clear sequencing and ever-improving descriptions. I had an eighth grade class in particular in which most of my students were writing senior or college level papers by December. Oh I was so proud!

All it takes is a bit of analysis. I'll write specifically about these structures in the future, but this is just one of the things I learned from high school, and I'd like to share a little bit about the others before this post gets too long.

2. Basics.
General, I know. But learning the basics: conflict, power shifts, obstacles, and resolutions made a big difference in the way I understood writing, as well as the way I was able to teach writing so my own students could understand it. And yes, these elements most obviously appear in narrative texts, but they also come up in informational texts. It just looks different. 

The big thing that helped me teach these elements was learning how to explain it in different terms. If students (like me) stared blankly up at the front of the classroom when terms like "internal conflict" came up, I knew it was time to break it down in a different way. So I'd strip away all the complication and explain it by drawing stick figures on the board, or explain the whole thing using characters from my students' favorite movies. Being able to think about these terms in a different way was extremely helpful in my teaching, but it was also helpful in getting me to remember what these things might look like in my writing.

3. Sentences, baby!
Learning to understand syntax and the different kinds of sentences and their purposes was huge in getting me to be a better teacher and a better writer. Looking at how sentences are actually structured helps me a ton, as does varying my sentence length and structure, which allows my work to have a more organic feel to it. 

I always loved when I could explain sentence types and structures to my students in a way that they were able to understand take into their own writing. 

4. Adjectives
Want to enrich your writing? Describe! This topic - like many English language topics - was one I loved getting into with my students. You could write, "The man wore a hat." OR, you could write, "The distinguished, tall, wrinkled man with a long, wiry silver beard wore a tattered silken top hat."

I like to remember the lessons I taught my students when I'm in my rewriting phase and everything feels choppy and short. I like to envision what my characters are seeing and hearing, and then I try to bring what I imagine to life with descriptive words. 

Now, I also like to remember that the words I write matter, and you definitely can have too much description. This is a great thing to remember as I'm putting together my questionnaire for my beta readers once each book has been finished. Are the descriptions believable? Were there any areas where there was too much or too little description?

That's all I'll share for now, but there are SO many things I learned in school that I still apply in my writing today. Stay tuned for more!

Whether you're writing a story, a research paper, or an email, these kinds of things help a ton. You can create a beautiful piece of writing if you first have the ability to see what it's going to look like and follow up with the questions you need to get your ideas on the page. ​