I had written already in my profile that I am in college, so I was a little surprised that you hadn't read that. Fishing was thus... erm... unnecessary.
While the maturity level of children (as well as the writing skills of everyone) varies greatly, I disagree that the ability to write well sets in during the mid school years if ever. Structure, vocabulary, wit, and to a certain extent, style do, but character development, an ability to express nuances, and the ability to spot and eliminate cliches in one's own writing come a bit later, late high school and early college at the earliest. Of course, for some otherwise decent authors, these skills never develop, just as some people never develop the ability to string words together in a coherent sentence.
As an articulate middle schooler and able essay writer, I wrote terrible stories, because my main characters were underdeveloped mary sues. I used back story and situational describers instead of character traits, and they always acted in the moral upright way after appropriately agonizing over it. They overcame great evil and dressed the way I would have if my mother hadn't dressed me in skort sets. She stopped doing that when I went to high school, thank God. My plots were long strings of cliches, and though abstractly, I understood moral dilemmas and situations in which two good smart people could disagree as to what was right, I couldn't write those situations.
This is mostly because of the way the human brain matures, a process which becomes complete at around age twenty-five. No amount of younger than usual maturity can change the fact that young teens and pre teens tend to write badly. It's also partly practice. Since the people who end up writing well as adults usually have been telling stories since childhood and writing since they first learned how, I guess that most of us need ten or more years to refine writing techniques.
From what you've said, I think your nephew may be a sociopath. As someone with severe allergies, including fatal anaphylactic responses, asthma, and violent seizures, however, I have found that people without similar problems tend to be blase about mine. Waiters tell me that there isn't anything I can't eat in a specific dish without knowing whether there is or not and then treating my resulting seizure as if it were an inconvenience to them that I planned solely to annoy them, for instance, or classmates who claim they washed the lotion of their hands when I ask, but really didn't and then look innocent when I have an asthma attack. A lack of empathy and moral sense seems to be distressingly common.
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branchandroot
Re: attacked by fish (haha)
Date: 2008-08-16 06:37 pm (UTC)While the maturity level of children (as well as the writing skills of everyone) varies greatly, I disagree that the ability to write well sets in during the mid school years if ever. Structure, vocabulary, wit, and to a certain extent, style do, but character development, an ability to express nuances, and the ability to spot and eliminate cliches in one's own writing come a bit later, late high school and early college at the earliest. Of course, for some otherwise decent authors, these skills never develop, just as some people never develop the ability to string words together in a coherent sentence.
As an articulate middle schooler and able essay writer, I wrote terrible stories, because my main characters were underdeveloped mary sues. I used back story and situational describers instead of character traits, and they always acted in the moral upright way after appropriately agonizing over it. They overcame great evil and dressed the way I would have if my mother hadn't dressed me in skort sets. She stopped doing that when I went to high school, thank God. My plots were long strings of cliches, and though abstractly, I understood moral dilemmas and situations in which two good smart people could disagree as to what was right, I couldn't write those situations.
This is mostly because of the way the human brain matures, a process which becomes complete at around age twenty-five. No amount of younger than usual maturity can change the fact that young teens and pre teens tend to write badly. It's also partly practice. Since the people who end up writing well as adults usually have been telling stories since childhood and writing since they first learned how, I guess that most of us need ten or more years to refine writing techniques.
From what you've said, I think your nephew may be a sociopath. As someone with severe allergies, including fatal anaphylactic responses, asthma, and violent seizures, however, I have found that people without similar problems tend to be blase about mine. Waiters tell me that there isn't anything I can't eat in a specific dish without knowing whether there is or not and then treating my resulting seizure as if it were an inconvenience to them that I planned solely to annoy them, for instance, or classmates who claim they washed the lotion of their hands when I ask, but really didn't and then look innocent when I have an asthma attack. A lack of empathy and moral sense seems to be distressingly common.