Writing Advice for Parents

They're driving you crazy, right?

The deadline is fast approaching and your child has promised to write the essay. Yet, there he sits playing "Halo" or texting his friends or sleeping. He promises he'll get it done. With each promise, though, your stress level slowly creeps up.

Here's some advice to help you through this process

Nothing is worth ruining your relationship with your child over.

Senior year is a time of growth for both your child and your family. He's ready to leave, and he wants his freedom. As a result, he's testing boundaries, and you're starting to fight over curfews, deadlines, and practices. That boy who snuggled happily with you at 10, is now a sometimes surly teen. So, it's only natural that he's fighting you on these essays.

Don't fight. It's not worth it.

Find someone--whether it's ForWord Consulting or someone else--to relieve your family of this stress. After all, when the applications are done, you want to still enjoy the time you have before he leaves in August.

Trusted Adults

Your child might not want you to read his essay. It might be about you or some other family circumstance that he isn't ready to share with you. Don't fret. This happens all the time and is no reflection on you.

I've read heart-breaking essays about depression, bulimia, a parent's death, divorce, civil war, disease, and disabilities. A parent has always known about the issue, but she might not be aware of how deeply it affected the child. Your child probably wants to protect you--as well as himself from questioning--and might not want to have you read it.

That's ok. Just ask him to find another person to read it over, give him feedback, and let you know when it's complete. This might be his English teacher, a ForWord Consulting consultant, or a family member.

Deadlines and Committments

Part of the stress here is that students have perennially submitted projects and reports on time, that is to say by 11:59:59 on the day it was due. And many of you have that student who gets an A, despite pushing that deadline.

Unfortunately, that won't really work for these application essays. While the content might be A-worthy, these essay topics require more thought than they're used to, which means they push off the proof-reading until the last minute.

What to do? If you think space is the answer, then give it, but tell him that he has until two weeks before the submission date to show you or another trusted adult the completed product. After that, you plan on stepping in. Until then, you'll back off and let him handle the load.

Proofread

If your child asks you to proofread, take a deep breath and be grateful for the opportunity. Think carefully, however, about what advice you give and how much fine-tuning you do.

College admissions have extensive experience in determining which essays are written by the student and which are written by parents. How? There are many writing tricks that each generation has that sort of sets them apart.

Adults tend to use "awesome," put two spaces after a period, hesitate to start a sentence with a conjunction, won't split and infinitive, write in the passive, and avoid contractions. Today's seniors are savvy about what flies for them with academic writing. So, don't change their language or tone to make it "better." But, you can still remove the poor word choices, use spell check, remove fragments and run ons and make comments.

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