Writing Tips for Teens

Let’s start with school. Your English classes provide free, invaluable lessons and writing tips that will last the rest of your life. Be sure to pay close attention to sentence structure and grammar. You also may want to check if your school has creative writing courses available and if so, sign up.

If you are already capturing your thoughts in a diary or journal, keep doing so and try to write something in it every day. If you haven’t started journaling yet, it’s never too late. Writing your thoughts down will give you plenty of material to expand on when you are ready to start a writing project. Just putting your pen to the paper each day will encourage you to write more and the more you write, the better you will get. I always wish I had kept writing in my journal as a teen.

When you are writing, always keep a thesaurus and a dictionary nearby to reference. A great grammar book and best friend to most writers is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It’s small enough to carry in your pocket or purse and is packed with the rules of writing.

When you aren’t filling your time with writing, read. Reading helps your writing tremendously in many ways such as proper format, structure and grammar. As the famous author Stephen King says, “If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all: Read a lot and write a lot.”