One thing that I've found with my DD-- who is NOT a natural writer, whereas I
am...
is that she MUST follow a "process" that organizes and forces her to work within a framework. She
cannot ad-lib her written work. Well, of course, she can do it a sentence or two at a time NOW (she's almost 14), but certainly not in elementary school.
The problem with her output was that she was so gosh darned
stubborn about this fact of her existence. She
kept trying to skip the outlining/prewriting/organizing steps of the process. Oy. Why? Because writing
just TOOK so much longer than anything else, that's why.I
always knew. Always. So that is where my remark about handing stuff back to her comes from. I've even been known to simply hold the rough draft and tell her "Okay-- now go follow the writing process. For real this time."
It was a brutal 5 or so years, but I seem to have prevailed.
Yes, in your case, evelyn, I'd say that this sounds like more going on. Because I could
always get work out of DD if she was actually movitated. It was just that sometimes the motivational strategy had to be pretty extreme to move her. Having to methodically follow a plodding process felt
so awful to her-- made her feel "slow" and "stupid" in ways that she found intolerable-- that pretty much any punishment/natural consequence was fine in comparison.
