In the forum, I mentioned that I was going to read Tomorrow is school and I’m sick to the heart thinking about it (Amazon: Cdn US). I’m about half way through the story. I ran across a paragraph that I couldn’t resist sharing:

After a few months of nothing, I received a book report from Sterling Fillier (whose longest essay to that point had been a four line disaster) that was three and a half pages long. It was largely a rambling, disjointed account of the book, and unfortunately the entire thing was written in three sentences, but he was writing! Sterling had discovered books, and after that I seldom saw him without two or three paperbacks. From that point on his writing made slow but steady progress, and I looked back on those three and a half terrible pages of marathon run-on sentences as a milestone in my teaching.

Over the last few years we have told many people in many ways, both in person and online, that writing skill would develop with the amount of reading they did and having opportunity and interest in writing about things that they wanted to write about. I am firmly convinced that teaching the mechanics of writing (grammar, spelling, composition, etc.) prior to learning how to express ones thoughts and ideas is counterproductive. And that writing skills will develop over time through practice and volume of reading.

It gives you such a lift to see someone in a totally different situation than you come to the same conclusion as you did. Especially, when you both arrived at it through trial and error.