For your teen, writing can become a powerful tool for expressing complex ideas, developing their critical thinking skills, and letting their personality shine through in their writing. Developing a strong command of grammar, spelling, and syntax will also help your teen write more clearly and confidently. Here are some strategies and activity ideas to support your teen’s progress and encourage their love of writing.
Whether they’re writing a text for school or working on a personal project, a few simple tips can help your teen write more easily and confidently. Here are some practical tips to help them with writing and revising.
Writing is a little like sports: You have to practise if you want to be good at it. By supporting your teen’s efforts, you’ll help them gain confidence. To encourage them to stick with it, it’s important to show them that:
Writing doesn’t just happen during schoolwork. Writing can be incorporated into many areas of your teen’s daily life, such as a well-written email, a thoughtfully worded text message, a catchy caption for a social media post, a polished résumé, a cover letter for their first job, or even a description of a creative project. These real-world opportunities to use writing help your teen see it as a useful, relevant tool rather than simply something they have to learn for school.
Encourage your teen to ask themselves a few questions to clearly define the intention behind their text before they even start writing:
Pausing briefly to reflect before writing helps your teen stay on track and makes the rest of the writing process more efficient.
Self-revision is an essential step in any writing project. The list of rules to follow in French is long: grammar, typography, agreement, syntax, etc.
Whenever your teen is unsure about a word’s spelling, an agreement, or a rule, they should get into the habit of checking it right away. Here are three strategies to help them self-correct effectively.
| Focus on the Most Common Mistakes | Rather than your teen trying to verify everything at once, suggest that they re-read their text once for each type of error or focus on the mistakes they make most often. This strategy is more effective than trying to catch everything in a single read-through. If your teen uses a self-revision procedure in class, encourage them to use it at home as well. |
| Proofread the Text Aloud | Once a text has been written, reading it aloud is a very effective self-revision strategy. It makes it easier to identify:
After they’ve read through the text once, your teen can move, add, delete, or replace words or paragraphs. They shouldn’t hesitate to re-read their text several times until they’re satisfied with the result. |
| Learn from Previous Assignments | By reviewing your teen’s previously corrected assignments with them, you can help them identify their strengths and areas for improvement. For example, if your teen repeatedly loses marks for past participle agreement errors, suggest that they pay particular attention to those elements the next time they self-revise a text. |
Having a dedicated, quiet, organized, and distraction-free space will help your teen focus and get in the right frame of mind for writing. Here are a few ideas for making the writing nook inviting and helping your teen get into “writing mode” more easily:
Here are some practical strategies to help your teen develop their writing skills.
Reading is a powerful tool during adolescence. The more your teen reads, the more naturally they absorb varied sentence structures, rich vocabulary, and correct spelling. Encourage your teen to read what genuinely interests them: novels, articles, comics, specialized magazines. It all counts!
Not all teens feel like writing “for fun” outside of school, and that’s perfectly normal! The good news is that writing has a very practical purpose in everyday life, and concrete opportunities with a clear goal and a real audience are often the most motivating for teens to write well. Here are a few ideas to suggest to your teen at home:
Write a Résumé and Cover Letter
| Whether it’s for their first job, an internship, or a volunteer position, this is a very practical exercise that requires your teen to choose their words carefully to make a good impression. |
Write a Professional Email
| Write to a teacher, coach, employer, or organization, perhaps to ask a question, apply for an internship, etc. It’s a great opportunity for your teen to work on tone, polite wording, and message clarity. |
Make a Case for Something They Want
| Your teen could write a text to convince you to grant them a privilege, let them go on an outing, or increase their allowance, using real arguments and counterarguments. |
Plan a Project in Writing
| Your teen could plan an outing with friends, a trip, a party, or a budget (list the steps, assign tasks, and compare prices). |
Write a User Manual or Guide
| Your teen could write about a topic they already know well (a video game, a recipe, or a tutorial about how to assemble something) to help a friend or younger sibling, for example. |
Write a Review or Critique (of a game, movie, restaurant, or product purchased online)
| This gives your teen the opportunity to learn to express their opinion critically but respectfully, using sound arguments and precise wording. |
The goal isn’t to force your teen to write creatively at all costs, but to show them that writing well is a practical skill that helps them be understood, get what they want, and present themselves effectively to others.
Discover all of Alloprof’s other resources to help support your teen as they improve their writing.