Expert answer
You know, writing is a really critical tool for life in general, not just for school. If you look, kids today write more than at any time I can ever remember. They email, they Facebook, they text, they tweet. They use writing to communicate with others. They don’t often think about it as writing, but it’s dead center in their life.
It’s also a really powerful tool for social change — writing for a purpose. For example, when our daughter was growing up, she — like every other kid in Maryland, Virginia and the District — worked on a “Save the Bay” water project.
In our daughter’s case, you can’t believe how much writing occurred around this. They wrote two grants that they submitted to the College Park government, they wrote letters to the Washington Post, the University of Maryland’s newspaper, and a College Park newspaper. They put letters in every mailbox around the stream where that they were trying to save. And they held rallies where they wrote their messages on signs. Writing was front and central in terms of trying to solve a real life problem. You don’t even think about it as writing when you’re doing that.
So writing is very important outside of school, in terms of both civic responsibilities and communicating with others.
Related:
In our Reading Rockets show, Growing Writers , we feature a teacher who has implemented a program called “Helping Hands” in her school, which encourages the students to engage in social change and use writing as an effective tool.