5 Amazing Advantages of Enrolling Your Child in a Creative Writing Course

Were you always amazed at how the greatest authors have created whole universes in their books? Did you ever wonder how you the world’s most gifted poets come up with moving literary pieces? How many times have you been awed with the intricate plots and twists in your favorite movies?

All these ingenious works of art are products of the imaginative minds of great writers. These are the result of hours and hours of concocting fantastic ideas and turning them into words that stir, influence and inspire people. These are creative writing masterpieces that have changed the world.

A World of Words

If you want your child to follow in the footsteps of these writing geniuses, then you can highly consider enrolling your son or daughter in a creative writing course. There are a slew of benefits that can be had from taking such lessons. These can help expand vocabulary and improve spelling skills, develop grammar, and allow your child to acquire advanced communication skills.

Aside from the academic and technical aptitude that your child can gain, creative writing courses can also be a tool to help support emotional, psychological, and social growth. Expressive writing is known to be a part of a group of creative therapies that can help people work through stressful, traumatic, or life-altering experiences.

There are different kinds of creative writing. Your child can learn how to write essays, poems, songs, short stories, or full-length novels. It can be argumentative, descriptive, expository, narrative, or persuasive in nature. These varied forms of writing will expose your child to the different technicalities of writing, as well as help them distinguish the specific types of language to be used for each kind.

So whether your child wants to be a poet, a novelist, a freelance copywriter, or some other profession that makes good use of creative writing skills, a creative writing course will surely open up the doors of discovery to the creative writing world.

Here are other compelling reasons why you should enroll your child in a creative writing course:

1. Improve grammar

One of the most helpful reasons why you should let your child take a creative writing course is to help improve his or her grammar. Under the tutelage of learned writing scholars and educators, your child will learn the basics of communication particularly grammatical rules.

Every student in a creative writing course must learn about the ground rules of grammar. How to use word classes, phrases, parts of speech, tenses, punctuations, degrees of comparison and other technical rules will be part of the syllabus. Sentence structure, as well as the use of idioms, synonyms and antonyms, and passive and active voice, will also be discussed to help improve their writing.

2. Enrich vocabulary and spelling proficiency

Naturally, becoming a wordsmith will require your child to learn new words, their meanings, and the various ways these can and should be used. A creative writing course will prod your child to encounter words that go beyond their usual lingo.

Nowadays, kids are exposed to technology and all these gadgets and smartphones have also posed a challenge to their way of speaking or writing. Text speak or the excessive use of emojis have rendered some of today’s youth incapable of articulating themselves properly and have degraded word spelling quality.

Creative writing will help them rediscover the beauty of words and how to spell them correctly. This will especially help them in their scholastic pursuits, in their future careers, or life in general.

3. Encourage self-expression

Writing can also be a great way to teach kids to express themselves. Creative writing, in particular, can be an effective outlet for their thoughts and emotions. By stringing words together, they can find a way to convey what they want to say in a more coherent manner.

In addition, studies have found that creative writing can help people who have stress issues or those who have experienced trauma in life. It can be their way to cope with the emotional distress that they are experiencing. It may be used as an alternative therapy to help promote healing and stimulate personal growth.

It affects the emotional state of individuals who have gone through life-altering or traumatic experiences. A study led by a psychologist, Joshua Smyth, Ph.D., of Syracuse University published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 281, No. 14) showed that writing may also lead to physical healing. It conducted a study on a group of people with asthma and rheumatoid arthritis where the participants were encouraged to write for three consecutive days in 20-minute periods.

Results showed that those who wrote about their stressful situations have shown improvement. Creative writing helped them get better and keep their health conditions from getting worse.

4. Improves reading ability

Writing is said to go hand in hand with reading. Improving one’s writing abilities can also spur enhanced reading comprehension.

In a paper published in the Harvard Educational Review in 2011, Stephen Graham and Michael Hebert provided evidence that writing can help improve students’ reading comprehension. It discusses longstanding beliefs that writing is a powerful tool for boosting thinking, learning, and reading skills.

Writing down notes, for example, reinforces what is being studied. Aside from just improving reading comprehension, sentence or paragraphs construction, text structures, and the whole writing process can also develop fluency and word reading skills.

5. Support math and science learning

Writing proficiency along with outstanding reading comprehension skills are also said to reinforce one’s abilities in mathematics or science. Writing and reading activities can aid students in analyzing, interpreting and communicating ideas in subjects like math or science. These skill sets are key competencies needed in evaluating sources of information and checking the validity of the information presented.

The literacy processes of reading and writing is a powerful combination to enrich mathematical or scientific prowess. These share an interrelated skills process such as communicating, comparing, contrasting, identifying cause and effect relationships, inferring and predicting outcomes.

A Right Way to Write

Creative writing courses can significantly help your child improve in several areas of learning.

Not only will these develop literacy skills, they can also help people in dealing with stressful situations in life. In a way, creative writing is a valuable means of communication and expression that contributes to learning and well-being.