Simple Strategies to Help Kids Write Great Essays
If you work on improving your kid’s essay writing skills from an early age, you can help home their writing skills for when they need them later in life. Helping your kids write great essays is more than just getting a good grade on a particular assignment. It’s about teaching them how to perform research, plan their content, write it out, optimize it, and so forth.
In this post, we’re going to be looking at some simple tips and strategies that you can teach your kids to help them write awesome essays. We will also talk about how some online tools and apps can play a part in the process.
- Teach your kids to always start early
Procrastinating and delaying work is in the nature of not only kids but even a lot of grownups. In the specific context of writing school essays, procrastinating can lead to a number of problems, such as:
- Doing haphazard research
- Doing fast and error-riddled writing
- Not being able to check later on
- Not being able to include citations
And so on.
On the other hand, if you teach the kids to do the research on time, they will be able to:
- Do proper, in-depth research
- Write carefully and organize their essay
- Easily proofread it later on and remove imperfections
- Easily create and add citations
- Teach your kids to perform extensive and diverse research
It is one thing to perform research extensively. And it is another thing to perform it diversely. The ideal type of research is that which is both extensive and diverse.
- Extensive research basically refers to the research that is done for a long period of time and in which a lot of material is perused. By performing research extensively, you can gain a lot of information and knowledge about the topic that you’re supposed to be writing about.
- Diverse research is basically the type of research that is done from a multitude of sources rather than just a few. The purpose and point of conducting diverse research is that you are able to get a well-rounded idea of the topic that you are writing about and you don’t develop a bias. Another benefit of doing this is that you don’t copy or imitate one particular source, which lessens the chances of accidental plagiarism.
- Teach your kids to plan out the essay before writing it
Another important tip to follow when writing essays is to create a plan and outline for it before you get started. This is something that you should teach your kids as an important part of the essay-writing process.
When an outline is made for an essay, it helps to keep you from including irrelevant stuff and diverging from the main point. It also helps you organize your thoughts beforehand so you can save yourself the hassle of thinking and brainstorming later on.
Creating an outline does not have to take up a lot of time and effort. Once the research is done and the points are all compiled, it can be done in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is list down the parts and headings that you want to include in the essay. You can list them briefly so that you can remember what they stand for afterward.
- Teach your kids to check for grammar and spelling issues in the content
Another important thing that you should teach your kids when writing essays is to check for grammar and spelling issues once they are done completing the draft. Grammar and spelling issues are quite common, and they can occur even more frequently when the content is written by a schoolkid.
Although these issues are common and can be made by everyone, there are steps that you can take and things that you can do to find and remove them from the final version of the essay.
Here are some things that you can teach your kids to do:
- Proofreading the text: Proofreading the text simply means reading it from start to finish a few times and looking for errors in it. These errors are usually related to spelling and grammar, but proofreading can help you find other problems as well.
- Using an online grammar checker: Online grammar checkers are some of the most commonly used software resources on the Internet. They can quickly scan a whole document and point out all the errors that it contains. On top of that, they can also provide the correct options that you can apply in place of the errors. You can have your kids use a free grammar checker on their content easily.
Once your kids know how to do this, they will be able to ensure grammatical correction in their essays and qualify for a good grade.
Final Thoughts
Those were some simple tips and strategies that you can use to help your kids write great essays. You should ensure that they get started on writing the essay well before time. You should also ensure that they plan it all out first so that they can write smoothly without worrying about what to discuss when they’re actually preparing the first draft.
Performing good research and ensuring grammatical perfection are also important strategies that you should impart to your kids.