writing tips | Page 4

10 Things We Believe about Teaching Writing

I have been teaching teens to write for a quarter of a century (Twenty-five years just sounds longer when you put it that way, doesn’t it?), and the online writing instruction service I founded, WriteAtHome, has been in business for a dozen years. In all that time we’ve learned a lot about how to teach writing effectively. Here are ten of the most important.

In Defense of the Adverb

7

A common error among young writers is to heap on the adjectives and adverbs, while more experienced writers prefer to concentrate on nouns and verbs, using modifiers selectively. Mark Twain famously hyperbolized: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.” But let’s be reasonable.