Do you remember being taught to write? Composition, not penmanship.

[ScoutTN]

As I have been thinking about my children's writing skills and about what methods and curricula will best help me to teach composition next year, I realized that I cannot remember ever being taught these things.

 

I do remember lots about grade school including grammar instruction, RAs, not understanding math after 5th grade, lots of life science, spelling bees and tons of reading. I remember receiving clear instruction and correction on my writing assignments as a high school student, but not before that.

Seems odd that I don't remember this at all. I guess it just wasn't interesting to me! ;)

 

I wonder what my kids will remember as they think back, years and years from now?

[Crimson Wife]

I remember doing dictation in 4th and outlining in 5th. A few units on poetry-writing here and there. Other than that, I remember a LOT of "writers' workshop" and not much actual instruction.

[Ellie]

Not really.

 

The first instruction I remember specifically was in the 7th grade.

 

But we did lots of writing. In fourth grade we had to copy our spelling words from the chalkboard, alphabetize them, and write sentences (and later, stories). I had to do that in fifth and sixth grade, as well. I count that as writing. :-) Also, in sixth grade we had to do reports every six weeks on different geographical areas/continents--the more pages, the better. I count that as writing, as well.

[Lara in Colo]

I remember lots of writing instruction!!  Mrs. Rory-- 10th grade advance placement writing--- Goodness-- the first half of the year everything came back bloody (from the red ink)  She is one of my my favorite teachers of all time (I liked the tough, no nonsense ones). 

[Harriet Vane]

In grammar school and junior high, I remember lots of grammar drills.

 

Separately, I remember lots of writing assignments but really no instruction in how to write.

 

In high school, I had excellent writing and speech instruction. My two English teachers were incredibly good instructors and very thorough. I felt they outstripped many of my college professors.

[Hkpiano]

I was homeschooled. I remember writing sentences using my spelling words and i think I occasionally had to answer essay-type questions for history and science (my parents used Abeka for those subjects). I definitely remember diagramming sentences, also with Abeka. I also remember doing copywork, although my mom didn't call it that and it seemed fairly random ("Wow, Dickens really liked long sentences!") and mostly done for penmanship practice. There were occasional book reports. And of course, we wrote the obligatory thank you notes and other letters. I think I wrote a letter to a newly elected President Clinton when I was 8...

 

Once I was in high school, they really started working with me on my writing skills. My dad took over at that point. I had to write a rough draft paper every day and fine-tune one into a 250 word polished essay each week. My dad was tough, too. At first they came back, as a previous poster put it, "bloody." But I eventually improved (or at least learned not to make the mistakes that were my dad's pet peeves)!

 

Probably more detail than you were looking for, but yes, I definitely remember being taught how to write! :)

[Tsuga]

As I have been thinking about my children's writing skills and about what methods and curricula will best help me to teach composition next year, I realized that I cannot remember ever being taught these things.

 

I do remember lots about grade school including grammar instruction, RAs, not understanding math after 5th grade, lots of life science, spelling bees and tons of reading. I remember receiving clear instruction and correction on my writing assignments as a high school student, but not before that.

Seems odd that I don't remember this at all. I guess it just wasn't interesting to me! ;)

 

I wonder what my kids will remember as they think back, years and years from now?

 

Yes. I remember HATING the letter "o" in cursive in second grade. I remember the five-paragraph essay and the expository essay. I remember learning about plot and turning personal narratives into things with identifiable plots. I remember sentences with spelling words and huge dioramas of an entire phylum in fifth grade. I remember learning the outline--fill-in--text format. I remember peer review and multiple versions of each essay in high school.

 

We also did 10-page country reports, and I remember a 20-page report on outer space in 3rd grade which I loved.

 

I remember writing a 110 page diary of a pioneer child that had to meet certain criteria, in the 8th grade. It came back quite marked up but then we moved!

 

I remember in high school writing a 5-page research paper on the Iliad according to specific instructions. It was hard.

 

I went to a middle-to-low ranked high school. Most of my schools had average rankings because we always were poor and went to school with poor people.

 

But there were always opportunities to learn. I have learned now that what I made of the opportunities and what my mom did for me was far more important than school ranking or how many kids dropped out pregnant or to work.

[desertflower]

In elementary school, I remember writing words to learn how to spell. I remember sentence diagramming in middle school. I remember writing essays and reports in high school. Then only to be told to forget everything you learned in high school when I got to college. Lol

[SparklyUnicorn]

No, not directly.  Probably the first time I was taught directly was college, but I'm referring only to research type papers with specific documentation styles.

 

 

[Sherry in OH]

From what I remember of elementary school writing, the focus was on learning to write legibly.  I remember having to write sentences for spelling words but nothing more demanding than that.

 

I did have some writing instruction in middle school.  I remember that we were supposed to write outlines before writing our papers.  The outline had to be turned in with the paper.  I would write my paper first and then the outline.  I also remember a substitute teacher being appalled that we hadn’t been taught to diagram sentences.  For one week, we learned about diagraming.  Then the regular teacher returned.  Diagramming sentences was not in her lesson plans. 

[sbgrace]

No. I remember bits of high school level courses, though not how I was taught specifically. I remember nothing about my grade or middle school composition instruction. My best friend remembers being taught a hamburger type model, and felt it hindered her in college.

[SkateLeft]

I don't remember any actual instruction in school. Oddly enough, I remember *exactly* what the clock looked like my high school classes though. I spent a lot of time staring at those clocks.

[Kathy in Richmond]

In 7th grade I remember explicit teaching on how to write different types of paragraphs. Up till then, we were given writing assignments & expected to perform without real teaching.

 

In 10th grade good Mrs. King (honors English) was a harsh but wonderful task mistress in essay writing, and in 11th grade Miss Allenson (pre-AP) was even tougher. I'm forever grateful to the two of them for their strict standards and critiques. I've saved a folder of my work (all red-inked!) from the latter two to this day, because it still helps me to see where I need to improve.

[Jackie]

I actually remember quite a bit of writing instruction during late elementary and middle school years. It was all very formulaic. I remember spending an inordinate amount of time on how to write a paragraph, with requirements for a topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence. Same general formula for how to write an essay: an introductory paragraph, three supporting paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph. And I remember how incredibly boring and useless I thought writing was. I was gifted with some IEW materials and I was looking through them a few weeks ago. They will be regifted soon as they gave me horrible reminders of the absolute joylessness of writing at those ages.

[Mom22ns]

In 4th-6th grade my school used a writing program that took us from sentences to paragraphs to expository essays. I had very little writing instruction after that. It was assumed that we knew how to write. New formats were introduced with what they required and the assignment, no real instruction. I used the basics of what I learned in that writing program all the way through college to produce papers that never received less than an A. I am a natural writer, but really, I forever used the underlying organization and structure that I learned in elementary school. 

 

I tried to look up the program when teaching my kids to write. I knew what it was called. It has of course been revised until it was barely recognizable and I wasn't able to use what I found.  :svengo:

[Garga]

I don't remember much of actual instruction in anything, but it must have been happening as I know quite a lot of things. Somewhere in between all my daydreaming in school the teacher was doing her/his job after all.

[laughing lioness]

No. I remember no writing instruction but a lot of demanding writing assignments. I was always rather lost. I got by because I read early and voraciously and am an intuitive learner. That's one of the reasons I love simple stuff like IEW- it spells it out and makes it do-able. 

[Joker]

I remember vividly being taught cursive in 3rd grade. We had penmanship every single day. I hated it!

 

I remember learning outlines in 4th grade. I remember my first real research paper in 6th grade. We had to do outlines, tons of note cards (with specific instructions on how to do them), a rough draft, and a final paper. I remember feeling like it was never going to end. I also recall my 8th grade English teacher because she was awesome and taught me a great deal. After that, the teachers and their writing instruction seemed to go downhill.

[IsabelC]

I barely remember being taught anything about writing at school. (I don't know whether that's because I was quite accelerated and tended to figure things out before we 'got to' them, or whether my teachers were very slack, or whether I was just uncharacteristically inattentive during writing instruction.) The only thing that really stuck in my mind was being told to write an introduction, main body and conclusion for an essay (in the teacher's words, "Tell 'em what you're gonna say, then say it, then tell 'em what you said", which in hindsight isn't particularly useful advice).

 

The other aspect of writing that I remember from early elementary years is that they always seemed to want illustrations. I loved to write, but I detested drawing (my aspie perfectionist side found it excruciating that my barely ordinary kid drawing talent couldn't produce images of photographic accuracy) and resented being expected to illustrate nearly everything I wrote. Now, from a teaching perspective, I understand that the drawings were probably there primarily to make the activity more engaging for those kids who found writing difficult, and certainly not in the expectation that I would produce artistic masterpieces. But I still make a point of never requiring my kids to draw: when I ask them to draw, I always mention that they can write instead if they would prefer, although as it happens they all prefer to draw rather than write extra.

[Farrar]

Oh, absolutely. I wasn't given any direct instruction in elementary school. Just wrote stuff - book reports, stories, answers to questions, etc.

 

In middle school - and this was hilariously bizarre to me even at the time - in 6th grade we had to take a statewide standardized essay exam. So they called the entire team (like 100+ kids) into a single giant space and gave us like a 20 or 30 minute introduction to the hamburger essay. Super canned. And then we took the exam like two days later and never heard about it again or had to write anything longer than a paragraph. No essays in 7th grade. In 8th grade, we had to write a research paper, and got a lot of bibliography instruction. I wrote something totally absurd like 20 typed pages (I think it was supposed to be like 4-8 pages). The teacher handed it back to me and told me she had not bothered to read it but my bibliography was fine. So, primo instruction there, right?

 

In high school though, I remember having everything I wrote in freshman year completely eviscerated. Like, completely. Passive voice, better topic sentences, better thesis statements, better varied sentences, make things short and stop trying to bs everything, etc. etc. And that continued all through my school career in English classes. By the time I took the AP English Lit, it was like a joke to get that 5. Or to write a research paper. It was not always an easy experience, but when I got to college, I was *appalled* at what poor writers everyone was. I mean, I wasn't always the best and I definitely had things to learn, but there was a bottom half in nearly every class I was in for the first two years that was just pathetically bad. And, of course, eventually most caught up, but it was interesting to me that the writing standards were so much lower for so many of my fellow students.

[Reefgazer]

I don't remember ever being taught anything on how to write an essay, research paper, or composition.  I remember writing a research paper as a high school senior, but have no idea where I learned how to do so.  It went well, so I must have picked up a book that taught me or had someone show me, but I cannot remember for the life of me, and I usually have a good memory for such things.  As in, I am in my 50s and clearly remember the name and cover design, along with some of the readings, in my Kindy and first grade readers.

[go_go_gadget]

I know we didn't have instruction beyond penmanship and spelling before fifth grade, and in fifth grade we basically just wrote *more*, and I don't remember instruction in style or substance. In eight grade we learned to outline, and at some point around then we learned the five-paragraph essay. In high school and comp. classes at uni I just kept doing what I'd always done, and the only thing I learned was about the split infinitive (the only correction made to a paper I turned in all of high school and uni comp, which speaks more to the standards than it does to my capability). A some point my medieval lit professor told me that the ''tell them what you're going to tell them, then do the telling, then tell them what you told them'' was actually no good, so I stopped doing that. But yeah, I learned that from my sister, not one of my own professors.

 

So I'm definitely working ahead of my kids in comp. material, and will be having my sister spot-check them every once in a while. 

[Ellie]

As I have been thinking about my children's writing skills and about what methods and curricula will best help me to teach composition next year, I realized that I cannot remember ever being taught these things.

 

I do remember lots about grade school including grammar instruction, RAs, not understanding math after 5th grade, lots of life science, spelling bees and tons of reading. I remember receiving clear instruction and correction on my writing assignments as a high school student, but not before that.

Seems odd that I don't remember this at all. I guess it just wasn't interesting to me! ;)

 

I wonder what my kids will remember as they think back, years and years from now?

 

I don't know what "RAs" are. :confused1:

 

But given the fact that most of us don't remember being *taught* to write, I wonder if we need to be making writing instruction into such a big deal, KWIM? Do we *really* need all those heavy-duty writing programs? teach little children who are only 8yo how to write a five-paragraph essay? require our dc to do all the note-taking and outlining and whatnot that many recommend?

[Loesje22000]

No,

I never have.

although somehow people expected I could.

So I had to rewrite many papers, and had always feedback in the style: 'not good enough for this level'.

[HelenNotOfTroy]

I remember being taught outlining and how to use the MLA style for a research paper, but the only explicit writing instruction I can recall was from my college composition class. The professor expected us to write a five paragraph essay exactly the way he taught it.

[rdj2027]

Funny, I was just talking about this to a friend of mine.  In elementary school we had six tests in German class each year, four dictations and two essays or reports but I cannot remember any writing instruction, just spelling. Penmanship was its own subject.  By 5th grade we wrote two dictations and four essays per year but again no instruction.  Eight grade and up it was all essays and literary analysis, no instruction.  By the time we graduated most people wrote reasonably well. However, we read a lot, we had many years of grammar instruction and copied just about everything from the blackboard.  We had to write in every subject.  Our teachers were also relentless in correcting speech.  When I started my kids on writing I noticed they often wrote the way they spoke.  I began to pay more attention to how they formed sentences when they were talking and lo and behold, their writing began to improve after I started to correct them or asked them to rephrase.   My two older ones are language inclined and naturally speak and write well, the two younger ones have to work at it.

[SparklyUnicorn]

No. I remember no writing instruction but a lot of demanding writing assignments. I was always rather lost. I got by because I read early and voraciously and am an intuitive learner. That's one of the reasons I love simple stuff like IEW- it spells it out and makes it do-able. 

 

Yeah I remember thinking why does writing feel so vague to me.  Somehow I managed, but I do wish I had some instruction.  Although now working through some books with my kids the instruction is sometimes pretty dumb. 

[Heidi]

No, I received zero writing instruction.  I thought the education I received in PS was horrible and a huge waste of time, which is the main reason I homeschool.  

[Melissa B]

Yes, 7th and 8th grade English were primarily focused on writing and oral presentation skills. 7th grade was paragraph focused and 8th was essay focused.

[ScoutTN]

 

I don't know what "RAs" are. :confused1:

 

Read Alouds. We had story time in the afternoon all the way through grade school. My fourth grade teacher was the best; he read The Hobbit and he could do voices! :)

[Library Momma]

In third grade I remember having to do book reports.  We started learning the 5 paragraph essay format in 4th grade.  I remember three large papers I had to write in 4th including footnotes and a  bibliography.  One was about Jesse Owens, one was about French Guiana and one was our choice, which had to be an answer to a question we posed.  I wrote about genetics in response to "Why are my eyes hazel?" From 5th on the writing just got more intense and moved away from book and subject reports and more towards thesis papers.  We started writing lab reports in 6th grade.  I remember my first larger scale creative writing assignment in 6th.

 

My kids (5th and 7th)have had similiar writing experiences but also touced more on persuasive and creative writing in early elementary.  I actually wish I had done more creative writing early on and do not recall learning persuasive writing at all.

 

Edited to add I graduated High School in 1987.

[ByGrace3]

I remember being taught how to outline, topic sentences, paragraph construction. We used notecards and outlining to develop longer research writings. I remember being taught bibliographies, quotations, dialogue, and research papers-- it was all done step by step-- so yes. I was talk composition. Fwiw I went to a private Christian school that taught Abeka English/LA.

[Crimson Wife]

 

The other aspect of writing that I remember from early elementary years is that they always seemed to want illustrations. I loved to write, but I detested drawing (my aspie perfectionist side found it excruciating that my barely ordinary kid drawing talent couldn't produce images of photographic accuracy) and resented being expected to illustrate nearly everything I wrote. Now, from a teaching perspective, I understand that the drawings were probably there primarily to make the activity more engaging for those kids who found writing difficult, and certainly not in the expectation that I would produce artistic masterpieces. But I still make a point of never requiring my kids to draw: when I ask them to draw, I always mention that they can write instead if they would prefer, although as it happens they all prefer to draw rather than write extra.

 

This post brought back vivid memories of how happy I was when my parents bought their first computer (a Mac Classic) and I discovered the clip art feature. The clip art was pathetic by today's standards but back in 4th grade I thought it a lifesaver.

 

[shawthorne44]

I do, because it was so late.  Junior year of high school.  Somewhere in middle school I'd supposedly had a creative writing class.  But the teacher had just said, "Add lots of adjectives".  So, we did.  But, didn't learn anything.  

[Ellie]

I remember being taught how to outline, topic sentences, paragraph construction. We used notecards and outlining to develop longer research writings. I remember being taught bibliographies, quotations, dialogue, and research papers-- it was all done step by step-- so yes. I was talk composition. Fwiw I went to a private Christian school that taught Abeka English/LA.

 

I learned some of that in sixth (bibliographies, probably outlining), and seventh (how to use reference materials), but I didn't learn to do notecards or using outlines to develop a research paper until I was a junior. However, I learned *how to write* before then. 

[JDoe]

I realized that I cannot remember ever being taught these things.

 

I am fairly certain the reason I cannot recall having been taught these things is because they did not teach these things. The entire thing consisted, mainly, in reading various fairy tales (fiction) and then writing (spontaneously) other, entirely unrelated, fairy tales (albeit shorter). 

 

Unfortunately, I do not have the impression that the method in public school where I grew up has changed at all.

[MrsRobinson]

For me, elementary school was all spelling, parts of speech, formatting a personal letter and a business letter. Book reports were just a paragraph of who/what/when/where so the teacher knew we actually read the book. I remember "brainstorming" with the bubble webs on the chalkboard but I don't remember to what end.

 

In middle school, some teachers put class notes in outline form on overhead transparencies for us to copy. So I guess that taught outlining??? I remember intro, body, conclusion type essays somewhere in there.

 

High school was a mixed bag. I was really hard on myself and didn't think I was smart enough for AP classes. So I wasted 3 years with teachers that we just counting down the days to retirement and used more movies than written materials to "teach." Finally, my homeroom teacher convinced me to take her AP English Lit class senior year. Best high school class I took, across the board. I learned so much from her. All tests were esssay tests (weekly), she expected a lot of her students but projected confidence that the ability was within us to produce a quality essay. Still so grateful to her for not giving up on me and pushing me to take her class.

[Sneezyone]

I was definitely taught to write. My school had a heavy focus on creative writing for early elementary students. We 'published' our own stories, bound our works with cardboard covers and rubber cement, shared our 'books' with each other and had author celebrations (class parties) every year. In middle school (we lived in Connecticut at the time) my teachers took things to a new level. Strunk and White and Zinsser were introduced. I can't remember which grammar program we used but I remember having to memorize prepositions and diagram sentences ALL.THE.TIME. We were routinely required to write papers of 5-7 pages with thesis statements, outlines, parenthetical references, and 'works cited'. My teachers were very liberal with the red pen and we did a lot of editing and revising. By the time I got to high school, writing well was second nature. I didn't realize how fortunate I'd been until college when I read the drafts my friends produced. Yikes.

[PeachyDoodle]

I remember being taught the 5-paragraph essay format in a supposedly advanced* 7th grade English class. I also remember thinking even then that it set my writing back at least two years, with its silly opening and closing paragraphs that were essentially the same thing. But I was naturally a decent writer. In 3rd grade, I recall the teacher assigning a story (she assigned lots of stories) and specifically announcing to the class, "No one is allowed to use dialogue. You all don't know how to write dialogue. Except for Peachy**, she can use it." I had no clue what "dialogue" was; I just wrote my story the same way I always did.

 

So maybe the 5-paragraph thing was good for students who had more trouble organizing their thoughts. Other than that, I remember a lot of assignments and very little instruction. I honestly don't think it was ever "taught." You either got it or you didn't.

 

*That class was advanced in other ways, just not writing. For me, anyway.

**Name changed to protect the not-so-innocent.

[TrixieB]

I was never taught formal writing in school.  In 7th grade, we were taught grammar, but not how to write.  In 7th or 8th, we had to take notes on notecards to write a report.  But there wasn't any instruction on how to make an outline, etc. 

 

You know what - I skipped a fair amount of school and maybe all the writing instruction was given on the days I was absent?

 

The only writing I remember doing:

 

a city report in 7th grade

a science report in either 8th or 10th grade

a couple of 1-2 page papers in 11th grade English

500-word essays in 12th grade history

 

Surely that can't have been all the writing I did?

 

 

[Daria]

I remember lots of writing instruction.

 

In Kindergarten, I remember learning how to write little sentences in little notebooks.  

 

In 4th grade, we wrote "research reports" about the planets.  I got Jupiter. They were divided up into sections, so it was really just a series of single paragraphs on "The moons of Jupiter", "The temperature of Jupiter".

 

In 5th and 6th grade we wrote a lot, creative writing class, and also long research reports that we did with note cards, and outlines.  I did one on "Great Women in Medicine", and one on "Jane Goodall and The Chimps of Gombe Stream".  

 

This pretty much continued through high school.  I also took 2 years of creative writing class on top of English class. 

[KSinNS]

I wrote 1 essay in junior high, and two in high school (physics essay in grade 11, English essay on Animal Farm in grade 12). Someone briefly told us about outlining or cards. Somebody mentioned footnotes once. Oh, and in grade 12 all of us were berated for not having a title for our essays. Oh, and we did journalling in grade 4. I made puzzles for the teacher and drew pictures. 

 

Presumably someone taught me rules for capitals and periods, because I know those. I remember being taught usage rules (the heres, theres, lie/lay etc), apostrophes, and commas. We did a few weeks of grammar in grade 8 where I heard for the first and last time about a predicate. 

 

Our writing was so notoriously bad that the only class that everyone had to take at my university was english 101-where we learned about the semicolon, the run-on sentence, the sentence fragment and the 5 paragraph essay (tragic, but it was a big step up for me.) The English profs hated the class, but it spared them the trauma of the comma-splice. :-} 

[KSinNS]

But......we were taught absolutely beautiful penmanship. â€‹The McLean Method for Teaching Writing. I think it was unique to my home province, but it was gorgeous, perfect slant, elegant curls on the cursive capitals, smooth loops and angles. I can't write to save my soul (my teacher once said my writing looked like the wanderings of an alcoholic spider) but I always admired beautiful penmanship. 

[In2why]

The very first time I remember actual instruction was in 8th grade when we had to write a research paper and we learned how to take notes, prepare an outline, and of course cite our sources. In high school we were taught persuasive, informative, and descriptive writing. That is really it now that I think about it.

[shawthorne44]

I wrote 1 essay in junior high, and two in high school (physics essay in grade 11, English essay on Animal Farm in grade 12). Someone briefly told us about outlining or cards. Somebody mentioned footnotes once. Oh, and in grade 12 all of us were berated for not having a title for our essays. Oh, and we did journalling in grade 4. I made puzzles for the teacher and drew pictures. 

 

Presumably someone taught me rules for capitals and periods, because I know those. I remember being taught usage rules (the heres, theres, lie/lay etc), apostrophes, and commas. We did a few weeks of grammar in grade 8 where I heard for the first and last time about a predicate. 

 

Our writing was so notoriously bad that the only class that everyone had to take at my university was english 101-where we learned about the semicolon, the run-on sentence, the sentence fragment and the 5 paragraph essay (tragic, but it was a big step up for me.) The English profs hated the class, but it spared them the trauma of the comma-splice. :-} 

 

Wow, you learned about a predicate!   I am impressed.   I didn't even learn the a/an rule until I was a senior and that was from a friend who was in the honors classes.  I learned more grammar from those Saturday Morning cartoon clips then school.  

 

Just this last weekend I was one of the scholarship essay judges.  One of the sub scores was on grammar.  I had to read out about five different sentence out to get grammar opinions from the fellow judges.  

[Leav97]

I don't remember specific instruction until 9th-grade english.  I learned more about writing that year then I did in any class before or after.

[Stellalarella]

I don't recall instruction in writing.  I remember being given writing assignments, though, but only beginning in 4th grade--and those were very, very few.   My youngest sister was 10 years my junior (at the same school) and I do remember her coming home in lower elementary talking about her writing instruction.  The school had implemented a computer program that "taught" the kids writing by using forms.  This is the form for an opening sentence, this is the closing sentence, etc.  I was  headed off to college and I thought the  methods they were using with her were terrible!  :)  As if a 19 year old high school graduate is an expert on these things.  

 

Apparently writing instruction changed dramatically from the early 80s to the early 90s at our little grade school.  

[Dory]

I remember my first book report. I had to say it in front of the whole class in second grade. I must have written and re-written that thing a dozen times before I had both me and my mom happy with it. I remember not understanding when one paragraph was supposed to end and another start. My verb usage was picked on a lot on that one. I also seemed to have a problem with run-on sentences.

 

But really, it was second grade.

 

Beyond that I don't remember much about learning my composition skills until high school.

[kirstenhill]

I have thought about this a lot recently. I remember learning to outline and give basic speeches in 4th grade. I remember a couple of specific assignments in 8th. Then no memories until learning how to write a five paragraph essay in 9th grade. And not much memory of actual composition instruction even in high school. I wish I knew how I learned, because by the time I got to college I found I could get A's on papers without much effort. I think learning to write must have come pretty naturally to me, and it befuddles me often as my daughter struggles and I just dont remember ever struggling with it. But since I remember so little from my early writimg instruction, maybe I did and I just don't remember?!?

[Stellalarella]

I know it's fiction, but does anyone else fondly remember the scene from the Little House series in which Laura Ingalls writes her first composition?  She is a teenager and has already been teaching school, even while she studies to finish her own schooling. ( From "These Happy Golden Years," the chapter "East or West, Home is Best".)  I just love that scene.