I picked up my younger daughter from school yesterday and asked if she had any homework.
She did: English. She had to write a chapter about two characters in the book her class is reading.
Then, as a writer and editor, I wondered about another area of inted that’s worth consideration: getting children to write fiction and prose (or about fiction and prose) is great but why is writing at school so often based on traditional literature?
Why don’t schools teach kids how to write flexibly as well? We could show them the fundamentals of…
- Web content
- News stories
- Sales copy
- Blog posts
- Non-fiction books
- Script writing
- Email writing (alien to many youngsters but still crucial in business and I can’t see it changing any time soon)
I’m not suggesting we get rid of the fiction bit but maybe we can modernise writing education.
