Making Your Bed Could Make You A Better Writer
by Rita Braun – Writing Coaches of Montana
You’d love to work with students in the Whitefish School District on their writing assignments.
With this thought, though, you hesitate, “But I can’t write!”
That’s OK, because I know you can think, and that you do it critically, every day. That is what this writing coach program is all about: Coaching students on how to think critically about their writing assignments.
Maybe you’re a parent. Every day you urge your children to take a chance on something, try something new, stand up for a deep belief, even make their beds!
In essay parlance, the urging goes something like this:
Claim: Making your bed every morning has many benefits!
Argument (proof of the benefits):
- Experience instant feeling of success! You set out to do something, and completed it!
- Declutter your life!
Life can be a tangled mess of incessant thoughts, school projects to be completed, meet-ups with friends, and doing the things you love. A simple act of decluttering is making your bed, which might inspire other ways you can declutter your life. - Impress friends as they walk by your room on the way to the bathroom. “Hmmm, he’s tidy! Wish I could be like that.”
Conclusion: Making your bed every morning can inspire other small ways to declutter, stay organized, and impress friends.
If you’ve done this sort of convincing and succeeded, then you can coach students. And if your children understand the process you went through to convince them to make their beds, well, then you can tell them that making their beds will help them become a better writer. That might be a stretch, but give it a shot.
Typical writing assignments are five-paragraph essays, where students are to make a claim (state a belief or take a position on an issue), present three arguments that support their claim, and then wrap up their thoughts on the issue with a conclusion.
Your take away? Helping students write better is based on helping them think critically about their writing.
And if you’d like more supporting evidence on how to convince your children to willingly make their beds every morning, read this essay on the benefits of making your bed every morning. I used it to write this piece to convince you that you’ve got what it takes to become a writing coach.
For more information about how the Writing Coaches program guides students to think critically about their writing assignments, visit the Writing Coaches of Montana.
