Your child’s writing: Garden or weed patch?

Find out how your child's writing is like a garden. Is it flowering and bearing fruit, or is it dry and listless?

In this fast-paced world, kids are bombarded every day with the idea that life is lived on the run: Drive-thru fast food, Twitter, and microwave mac ‘n’ cheese come to mind. Certainly, most of us can run to the store for a last-minute “anything.” Why grow your own veggies, for example, when you can pick up produce at the market in an instant?

Even writing, epitomized by text messaging and Facebook posts, has fallen prey to the tyranny of the immediate. Gone are the days, so it seems, when we mailed handwritten letters to one another. No one wants to wait for the postman anymore, let alone a tomato.

Though there’s a time and place for slap-dash communication, our kids need to learn that most writing—good writing—is coaxed into bloom through time and care. Lovingly tending his flowers and vegetables, the patient gardener understands this. The metaphor of the garden speaks clearly to writing. Let’s see what lessons we can learn about your child’s writing.

A Tale of Two Gardens 

When our daughter’s family lived with us for a time, we reaped the rewards of a well-tended vegetable plot. Aromatic sage, thyme, and mint spilled from big pots. Tender lettuces and spring peas sprouted and grew, followed by zucchini and the freshest of green beans. And our assorted tomato vines produced until February (that’s Southern California for you!).

Among other blessings, that year gave us a live-in “gardener” who nurtured that plot. A nut for all things green and growing, our gardener prepared the soil, sowed seeds, watered; thinned out plants that threatened to crowd or overtake; and transplanted seedlings to a better location. As the garden flourished, the patient gardener weeded, plucked snails, and staked tomato vines heavy with fruit. Through diligence and care, we enjoyed fresh produce for months.

A year later, in that once-thriving veggie patch, three leftover spindly pepper plants eked out a sad existence in a vast plot of dry earth, alternating between states of limp dehydration and occasional perkiness. A dozen shriveled red peppers hung languidly, no one bothering to pick them because they were so bitter—the result of an untended garden.

How your child's writing is like a garden | Garden metaphor

How Is a Story Like a Garden?

A poorly written story shares many traits with such a garden. Without nurture and care, it blooms and dies—if it blooms at all. On the other hand, a delightful nugget of prose is like a well-tended garden, with the gardener and writer sharing a common ideal:

To produce fruit people want to eat—to write a paper or story people want to read—I must look at gardening, at writing, as a process that takes time and attention

How is this accomplished?

1. By Planning the Garden

One who writes with little thought is like a foolish gardener collecting random seedlings and sticking them wherever he thinks they might grow. But a good gardener plans and dreams. During the winter months, he pores over nursery catalogs and plots out his garden, imagining orderly rows of colorful vegetables. The writer, likewise, doesn’t just casually throw words on paper like so many seeds. To avoid disorganized writing, he too plans and prepares, brainstorming as a means of gathering ideas and plotting story details.

2. By Setting Aside Time

A productive, healthy garden doesn’t grow itself. Without care, the seeds will simply sprout and die. So the gardener spends time preparing the soil and tending to the plants’ needs. Writing, like gardening, is a process. The fruit comes in time. A good composition doesn’t write itself either. If it’s going to produce worthwhile fruit, it too needs attention; the writer must spend time planning, writing, and revising.

How your child's writing is like a garden | Garden metaphor

3. By Thinning and Pruning

A farmer or gardener understands the danger of overcrowded plants. To take shape and thrive, a garden needs thinning, pruning, and weeding. In the same way, a paper needs to be rid of dull, vague words, unnecessary adjectives, and phrases that don’t fit. So once the ideas, like baby plants, begin to emerge, the writer must carefully thin out words and phrases that threaten to overrun or crowd his writing. He must prune his writing  and make room for new thoughts.

4. By Providing Support

As his plants begin to thrive, the gardener supports heavier vines with stakes to hold up the pendulous fruit. The writer too must support his writing with details, facts, or examples to shore up each main idea.

5. By Attending to Dry, Barren Patches

The attentive gardener waters wisely and fills in empty spots with extra seedlings or a few cheerful flowers. Similarly, the writer looks for ways to add more color, detail, or description to his writing, filling in bare, lifeless patches of prose. He must also transplant words and sentences from one place to another and water his composition with fresh ideas.

6. By Adding Interest

Just as a gardener introduces an unusual gourd or flower or tries out an idea for a trellis or drip irrigation system, a good writer experiments with sentence variation, figurative language, and using a thesaurus [affiliate link]. Both add color and appeal to their creations.

Your Child Is a Gardener

Was I proud to share the bounty of my vegetable garden that long-ago summer? Absolutely! Was I eager to show off the next year’s spindly little pepper plants? Not a chance! So let’s recap how you can apply this little analogy to your own child’s writing.

Find out how your child's writing is like a garden and he is like a gardener who plans, plants, prunes, and nurtures his story till it bears fruit.

Your children’s compositions are like a garden, and they, the authors, are the gardeners. To prune and shape a wordy, overgrown paragraph, they must trim away unnecessary words, remove vague and weak words, and find synonyms for repeated ones. Sentences may have to be reworded or rearranged—part of the transplanting process. Likewise, if the paragraph seems sparse, they’ll need to insert more colorful, concrete words or add more information and description to fill in bare places.

So whether their writing sits like a neglected weed patch, dry and listless, or takes shape, flowers, and bears fruit under their care, teach your children how very like a gardener they really are. Help them appreciate their role in the writing process as they brainstorm and write, edit and revise. They are, after all, growing a garden of words.

Copyright © 2008, 2015 Kim Kautzer. All rights reserved.

Photo credits: normanack (garden), Harry Rose (weeds), D Sharon Pruitt (seedling), courtesy of Creative Commons 2.0

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