Transforming Reluctant Writers | Andrew Pudewa
About this Episode
What if better writing doesn’t start with a prompt, but with what’s already living in a child’s mind? On this episode of The Brainy Moms Podcast, Dr. Amy and Sandy sit down with Andrew Pudewa, founder of the Institute for Excellence in Writing, to trace a surprising line from Suzuki violin training to strong language skills. Andrew shares how deep listening, memorized repertoire, and deliberate repetition lay the groundwork for fluent expression—whether you’re bowing a cello or crafting a paragraph. Input shapes output: the richer the vocabulary and sentence patterns a child absorbs, the more creative and confident their writing becomes.
We unpack the twin engines of memory and imagination and why they share the same neural real estate. That insight reframes everything from read-alouds to comprehension: prior knowledge often outweighs decoding when it comes to understanding, and books ask kids to co-create mental imagery word by word. Andrew contrasts that with today’s “cartoons on steroids,” where hypervisual stimulation, thin language, and passive consumption blunt attention and displace inner pictures. The fix isn’t anti-tech dogma; it’s smarter sequencing—long-form stories first, screen adaptations second, and daily habits that favor focus over flicker.
Then we tackle AI. Yes, modern tools can collect and polish at lightning speed, but only students who know the underlying process will use them well. Andrew argues for paper-first drafting to recruit more of the brain—motor planning, spatial processing, and the intuitive, artistic networks that spark better ideas. From there, we walk through his step-by-step method for transforming reluctant writers: start with short source texts, build keyword outlines, ask structured story questions, and move toward inventive writing that recombines known elements. Along the way, parents become coaches who prize process over product and help kids stack small wins into lasting confidence.
If you wonder about about attention, language, handwriting, and how to raise resilient thinkers in an AI world, this conversation offers clear tools and a hopeful roadmap. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s teaching a reluctant writer, and leave a review telling us one change you’ll try this week.
About Andrew Pudewa
Andrew is the founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing. As a global speaker and educator, he addresses issues related to teaching, writing, thinking, and spelling with clarity, insight, practical experience, and humor. His seminars for parents, students, and teachers have helped transform reluctant writers and have equipped educators with powerful tools to dramatically improve student skills. He’s a graduate of the Talent Education Institute in Japan, best known for the Suzuki method. He holds a certificate of child brain development, and he and his wife Robin homeschooled their seven children and are now proud grandparents of 19.
Connect with Andrew
Website: www.IEW.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/iew
FB: https://www.facebook.com/excellenceinwriting
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Read the transcript for this episode:
Dr. Amy Moore: 0:30
Hi, smart moms and dads. Welcome to another episode of the Brainy Moms Podcast brought to you today by Learning Rx Brain Training Centers. I’m Dr. Amy Moore here with my co-host, Sandy Zamalis. And before we introduce today’s guest, we want to invite you to sign up for our free monthly newsletter. So just go to The Brainymoms.com, sign up to receive that. It is filled with information and tips related to the topics that we cover in our podcast every month. So don’t miss out. And now, our conversation today is with the incredible Andrew Pudewa. Let me tell you a little bit about him if you don’t know who he is yet. Andrew is the founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing. As a global speaker and educator, he addresses issues related to teaching, writing, thinking, and spelling with clarity, insight, practical experience, and my favorite, humor. His seminars for parents, students, and teachers have helped transform reluctant writers and have equipped educators with powerful tools to dramatically improve student skills. He’s a graduate of the Talent Education Institute in Japan, best known for the Suzuki method. He holds a certificate of child brain development, and he and his wife Robin homeschooled their seven children and are now proud grandparents of 19. He’s here with us today to chat about lessons that he’s learned in his 30 years of teaching and supporting home educators. Welcome, Andrew.
Andrew Pudewa: 1:59
Thank you. Thank you, Amy and Sandy. It is good to be with you.
Sandy Zamalis: 2:03
I’m fangirling over here, just so you know. So I’m gonna get fangirling all morning. You my kids are 28 and 26, but you are a very heavy portion of my homeschool journey.
Andrew Pudewa: 2:15
So well, you’re either using a filter or starting having kids at 13 years old because you do not look old enough to have 26-year-old child.
Dr. Amy Moore: 2:27
But you’re very kind. I have a 26-year-old also.
Andrew Pudewa: 2:34
Yeah, you don’t look that old either, but you look less not that old than Sandy.
Dr. Amy Moore: 2:40
I look less not that old.
Andrew Pudewa: 2:45
Well, I’m very honored by the invitation. Thank you so much. I’m looking forward to this.
Sandy Zamalis: 2:50
You’ve been on our dream list uh since we uh did the podcast. I I’ve had you on our list of like, we need to get Andrew Pudwa on the show.
Andrew Pudewa: 2:59
Fun.
Sandy Zamalis: 3:00
Um you have been a staple in my homeschool journey, and I’m sure many of our listeners um as well, probably for the last 20 years. You’ve been a household name. And so I’m really excited for our listeners to hear what you have to say today because um, as I shared with you before we got on the podcast today, you were my first introduction into the importance of the brain and cognition and how the brain learns um in my homeschool journey. And so now that I live that every day, all day, uh, with what we do at LearningRx, but why don’t you share with our listeners a little bit about how you got um involved in learning in this way with that focus on cognition and training up the brain? I love that you have a brain development specialty and share more about that with our listeners.
Andrew Pudewa: 3:48
Yeah, so um I um I actually I dropped out of college, if you want to call it that. Um I didn’t see that my doing anything at San Francisco State University was gonna help me at that time in my life. And I was looking for something to do, and I had grown up playing the violin. So I thought I I kind of am decently good at this. Maybe I could teach it. And uh through some investigations, I won’t go into great detail, I ended up going to Japan and living there uh for three years, studying with Dr. Suzuki, the founder of the Talent Education Institute, and graduating from there. And that was a phenomenal experience. It was foundational for a huge amount of my understanding. But while I was there, I read an article that had been translated uh into uh Japanese and English. Uh it was a conversation between uh Dr. Glenn Doman of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential and Dr. Shinichi Suzuki. And I was fascinated with this article, so much so that I bought his book, What to do about your brain injured child, uh, how to uh uh teach your baby to read some of these books. And I read them and I thought this is where I should go. It was kind of a deep soul level knowing this was the next step in my life. And so I wrote a letter and said, you know, I don’t know if you need a violin teacher or not, but I just finished in Japan with Suzuki, um, and I’d love to find out about whether I could work for you. And they said, yeah, come visit us in Tokyo, we’ll be there on such and such a date. And it just absolutely blew my mind because I had never consciously uh known what brain injury was and how it manifested in all the different uh myriad ways. And uh they put me to work immediately. I could speak Japanese enough to do some basic little translation stuff, and I just sat there for two weeks and just watched them work with these families of brain injured children, everything from Down syndrome to cerebral palsy to severe autism to, you know, so mild that you might not even notice. And it it completely changed my world. So I went from Japan to Philadelphia and I lived and worked there um at the institutes for three years, where I uh did uh earn the certificate in childbreak development. I learned a tremendous amount. I did teach violin uh part part of the time. Mostly I was working in the clinic uh with, as I’ve said, the teaching programs of treatment to uh the families of brain-injured children. And there was some controversy surrounding it. Um, you know, the the basic medical establishment didn’t give it much credence, but what we did see is miracles. Children who, you know, couldn’t see, start to see, and children who couldn’t walk, start to walk, and children who couldn’t talk start to talk. And so that was very formative. So those two things were really pivotal in my understanding of children and how they grow and how their brains work and the effects of cumulative activity in developing sensory and motor pathways. And uh, and then I I did have to leave. I I think I would have stayed there forever. I was very, very happy. But uh I had some family issues, so I moved to Montana where my mother is, and I started teaching in a school, uh, teaching violin. Uh, then I went to teaching violin full-time. And uh so that all just kind of carried over. And then I just accidentally stumbled into this business of teaching writing, um, mainly as kind of like a side gig I could do to make enough money to afford to be a violin teacher. Uh, but after a few years it became uh relatively successful. And uh in 99 I went full-time into IEW. And I’m just so grateful. And I just look at how kind of the hidden hand has orchestrated my life to give me all of the experiences and connections and and wisdom and understanding uh that all has come together uh, you know, so well in my current work and service to families and teachers all over the world.
Dr. Amy Moore: 8:20
So I want to dive in a little bit to that relationship between um how we develop musical skills and how that has applicability um to developing reading and writing skills. So my youngest son is a music performance major in college. He’s a flautist, and his fiance is a cellist, and she’s also a music performance major. Wow. And so I love to watch them workshop new pieces because I like the um iterative process of practicing and then working on those areas that uh need a little bit extra work and then practicing some more and that going from you know novice to mastery, right, over that process, that cumulative spiral process of practice. And so that exact same process has applicability to the classroom, right?
Andrew Pudewa: 9:22
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It one of the things that I said once, and I think it was in the talk you mentioned hearing Sandy on spelling and the brain, is you can’t get something out of a brain that isn’t in there to begin with, right? So there’s input and there’s output. And so often, you know, in schools and even in homeschools, we’re mostly thinking, well, what we need is better output. And when I got into this teaching of writing, it that was the problem. They couldn’t get the kids in schools to write well enough to pass standardized tests. And this is, you know, back in the late 90s and O’s. And I started to wonder if part, or maybe even most of the problem, is on the input. Like, where are these kids getting their language from? Now, uh, one of the things that Suzuki did that was very radical in his day in the early to mid-1900s, was he had the children listen to recordings of all the pieces that they were going to learn to play. And so he recorded 10 books of repertoire and said, you know, listen every day. Actually, in the very beginning, it was real to real. Then it was records, then it was cassettes, then it was CDs, now it’s just MP3s. But that’s a fundamental part of the Suzuki approach because when you hear the piece again and again and again and again, then you you’re actually memorizing it. And and then to play it, you don’t really have to memorize the music. You know the music. It’s in your mind and heart. You just have to train your hands and fingers to do that. So uh that was pretty radical in his day. And then the other thing that was kind of radical was he insisted on students retaining a memorized repertoire. So a properly trained Suzuki student should be able to play any piece they ever learned on demand from memory with little or no errors. And uh, you know, that that level of repetition is something we don’t see as much in the Western American culture. We’re we’re kind of alluring, yep, you know, we did that, okay, we’re done. Whereas in the Asian culture, we see this in the traditional uh martial arts and and uh cultural things where they just understand repetition a lot more to build those really solid, solid neural connections so that things become second nature. And this happens, of course, with language, and uh we we won’t get some language out of the brain that isn’t in there, so we need to build it with repetition through memorization, with lots and lots and lots of auditory input. Because one of the cool things about language and music and and math and art, really anything, is any new idea, any new challenge that you have is really a combination and permutation of previously existing things. So a new piece of music isn’t entirely new, it’s a new combination of things that you have learned previously. So when your son and I I don’t know, you said wife or fiance or fiance, yeah. Um, you know, when they’re working through that, that’s that process of pulling out those things that they they learn and can do and putting them in a new and maybe tricky combination. And then that combination goes into the repertoire, and then that is available for uh another new and tricky combination down line. And so what we do know is that students who have memorized a large repertoire, uh whether it’s music or dance steps or, you know, martial arts moves or language, that memorized repertoire becomes the most accessible and useful database that a person can have to then be creative. The creative process is dependent upon the database of information that exists, the stock, the the assets that we have.
Dr. Amy Moore: 13:34
Yeah, we talk about prior knowledge all the time, um, of being, you know, a primary predictor um of achievement. Because like you said, if you don’t know about it, you can’t write about it.
Andrew Pudewa: 13:50
Yeah, you can’t imagine it. Um I heard a really interesting talk once by um uh uh he’s a n neuroscientist uh out in Virginia somewhere. He was talking about dyslexic kids in comprehension. And you’ll find this fascinating. So they had two groups of kids, all dyslexic. I’m sorry, one group of kids dyslexic, one group of kids not dyslexic. They took from the dyslexic kids the ones who knew how to play baseball, who played it enough to know it well, and they took from the not dyslexic kids kids who never played baseball. Then they gave them a short little story about baseball. Who do you think scored better? The kids who played it but didn’t read well, or the kids who read well but never played it.
Dr. Amy Moore: 14:38
Yeah, the kids who played it.
Andrew Pudewa: 14:40
Yeah, because it was it was inside them. So so uh I’ve been also really fascinated with our capacity to imagine things and the relationship between memory and imagination. Um, you probably know this, but not everybody does. But when you do uh uh fMRI scans and you you ask people to imagine something, and then you ask people to remember something, the part that’s that’s active in the brain, it’s the same part. Memory and imagination are really the same cognitive function. So if we want good imagination, we really want to attend to the furnishing of the memory in the broadest, most diverse way possible.
Sandy Zamalis: 15:28
So let’s let’s take that thought and let’s talk about the use of screens because that is probably the number one parenting issue that we have uh right now. What from your perspective has been the impact of screen use, um, especially for early developing brains, on that ability to create the, you know, those imaginative pictures in our head and how that translated translates into better comprehension and writing skills um down the road. What are what are you seeing? What is your uh learning behind that say to you?
Andrew Pudewa: 16:03
Yeah, there’s a few different ways to to think about this. Uh the first thing I would say is, you know, I’m not categorically opposed to screens. We’re we’re looking at each other on screen right now. Uh and um Jonathan Haidt, in his book, The Anxious Generation, he talks about the the value of long form movies that require some attentiveness and contemplation. Um But what we’re seeing is that things aimed for kids today are cartoons on steroids with very little language input, hyper, very hyper-stimulating visually, and there’s no opportunity for uh imagination. So you’ve got those three negatives going all at the same time. The first one um is being visually hyper-stimulated makes it hard for children to just close their eyes and imagine something. They’re always used to things that are flashing and moving and right there coming at them. It requires no effort because it’s just coming to you rather than you having to go to it. And so that itself was a problem. On the language side, uh, this really came in with television. It’s been going on a long time, and that is the language is kind of continuously dumbed down. And so the quality of the vocabulary that you will hear of coming from a video that is aimed for entertainment rather than education purposes, which most stuff is, particularly if it’s any kind of interactive game-like thing that kids will do on a on a on an iPad, um, it’s it’s not using much in terms of the range of vocabulary, the complexity of the syntax and the sentence structure, the grammar. They’re not building those patterns. Uh compared to, you know, before television, uh people had to listen to books and build the images in their mind so that they could follow what’s going on. And so it would describe a cave. And then the child is using all the words they can to create this mental image of a cave. And so it’s then allowing them to be co-creative in a way with the author. And and the great authors, you know, Lewis, Tolkien, the ones that kids love, they they are very good at using words to create imagery, and that all happens in the imagination. Uh and you could think, I I know I’ve had the experience of watching a movie uh uh of the book that I read first. Well, what happens? The images of the movie will overwrite in the memory the images you had from the book. And uh that’s kind of sad. If you’ve never read the book at all, there’s nothing there to overwrite. So you never had any imagination. The best you can do is go and try to remember, you know, the images you saw in in the movie, uh, which is why I think it’s very wise for parents, and you find a lot of homeschooling parents will do this because their parents did it to them. You can’t watch the movie until you read the book, which got a whole lot of 10-year-olds reading Lord of the Rings, I’ll tell you that. Um But there’s there’s that side of it as well. And then there’s just the radical passivity that happens when it requires no effort to be entertained. And uh unfortunately the entertainment is is cutting faster, new scenes, as I said, visually hyperstimulating. So it doesn’t really require even attentiveness to the screen itself anymore. And so I would view those as kind of the the three things we’re seeing, lowered attentiveness, consequently, lowered basic ability to learn things, because you can’t learn something if you can’t attend to it. Uh, the displacement of imagination and the opportunity for that, and then the low, low level of vocabulary and s and oversimplified syntax that’s so different from. The books that we used to read to children, and children used to read on their own, even as recently as 50 years ago.
Dr. Amy Moore: 20:38
Yeah, I can remember in college, and I’ll date myself here in the mid-80s, um reading this article called Technology and Democracy, and the author is alluding me, I’ll put it in the show notes. Um, but it was about um the flattening out of human experience and interaction because of technology, that this is in the 80s, right? That we were already recognizing that our use of technology kind of attenuated the human experience and that interaction and the complexity of um conversations, even that we have in person. And so then to look at that progression of how technology has exploded, um, especially in the last five years with artificial intelligence. Let’s talk about how artificial intelligence is impacting learning. And I mean, there was a recent MRI study, right, that showed that we’re losing connectivity with every hour of use of artificial intelligence. And don’t get me wrong, listeners, I’m not anti-artificial intelligence. I think as a clinical researcher, it has saved me hours of time finding research studies to then go and look at and read and uh confirm that that is actual research out there. But in terms of um the creation of knowledge or the lack of the need to actually co-create, like you were just saying, I mean, the impacts could be catastrophic to brain development and learning, right?
Andrew Pudewa: 22:27
Yes. And there there’s kind of two extremes. One is the um, let’s just go, let’s I actually saw, and I quoted in an article I wrote recently, a teacher who said literally, new idea, let’s stop teaching kids math. And then he went into this long explanation of we’re teaching kids all sorts of things that AI can do. Why are we bothering to do this? Why don’t we just teach them how to use AI and this idea of memorizing multiplication tables and learning how to spell and even learning grammar and even writing paragraphs? If AI can do all of that better, why bother teaching them? That’s that’s an extreme, but there are people who hold to this idea. I actually commented on his video and said, is this satire? And he wrote back and said, No, I am a real teacher and these are my thoughts. Um now, on the other extreme, you’ve got people who are saying the the threat here is existential. The the minds and brains and competency of our children is being eroded so quickly, we’ve got to, we’ve got to go back to basics. And uh and in a way, let’s just delay that interaction with technology as long as possible. Um, okay, those are two kind of extreme views. I I know where I stand in this, but I like to ask people this this kind of easy question. Let’s say you have two people and they’re both using calculators. Okay, we all acknowledge a calculator can do better math than I can, right? With better speed and better accuracy. Now, one person using a calculator knows some math facts, understands a little bit of, you know, math concepts like, you know, exponentiation or fractions or decimals, um, maybe can do a little bit of mental math, could figure out, you know, six times twenty-five in their brain, and another person doesn’t even know the multiplication tables and doesn’t know what a percentage is. Because there are high school students right now who fall in that category. Give them both a calculator. Who’s gonna use the technology better? It’s all it’s obvious. So I would look at it the same way. Okay, AI can collect up, organize, and present ideas um more efficiently and probably more accurately from at least a grammar and organization perspective, than than I could. All right, or than the average person. Now, again, you’ve got a person who’s learned how to do that by going old school. Okay, here’s three books from the library, or here’s three different reliable sources of information, extract, organize, present, refine, and and and go through that process. Yeah, AI could do it instantly, and it’s taking your poor kid seven, eight hours of painful school time to do it. But in the long run, who’s gonna be able to use the technology better? So I think there’s a lot to be said just for if you want to be used by AI or you want to be a user of AI, you have to understand the processes to some degree that it is replicating for you. Like it’s better to have the skill, which it will atrophy before it atrophies your skill, than to never have had the skill at all. Uh, so that would be kind of my position to just talk to people in general about why we should still have kids write reports, do research, you know, on paper if possible, and write on paper if possible, at least up to, you know, teenage years.
Sandy Zamalis: 26:41
I love that. Um, it’s almost like a like a battle between what I would call progressive education, kind of where we’re at right now, um, and then also that classical model, which I think sometimes when I think of the classical model of education, I think of it more like what you’re describing. I don’t think about it the way it shows up in classical education where you’re learning all these time periods. I think about it as there’s a base of knowledge you have to build first, right? There’s a lot of memorization, then you’re working with that information. And then at some point you’re able to teach that information. Like I think about it in those kind of sequential um kind of thought processes. And I love that about your approach in general and kind of what you’re highlighting here too. We really have to teach skill first. We have to build automaticity and skill first before we can ask kids to wield it well. Um, and that for sure comes across in writing and how to, you know, form letters. Uh part of the, I think, technology discussion for me that’s so frustrating as someone who works with kids every day is the lack of instruction and even handwriting anymore. So that how do we get them to write paragraphs if we can’t even get them to form a sentence with ease that isn’t painful and laborious for them in that process because they just haven’t had enough repetition in that basic menial task.
Dr. Amy Moore: 28:06
Yeah. I think about it as so um I use statistics software to analyze data, but I had to learn how to do statistical analysis by hand first, so that then I would know what to ask the software to do. Otherwise, that software is dangerous, right? I could just click anything, right? And generate output and not have it be valid. And so the same is true with any use of technology, right? Like we have to know what we are asking it to do so that it saves us a little bit of time, not because we don’t know how to do it ourselves.
Andrew Pudewa: 28:50
Yeah, exactly. The other thing that uh kind of bears on this is um some really interesting studies uh in the mid-Os came out of the University of Washington um on how writing on paper actually causes you to use more of your brain than typing. And the more part of your brain that’s being used is in the subdominant hemisphere, the artistic intuitive side, right? So when you’re writing on paper, and even making letters has a certain amount of shape and form and balance and beauty to it. But there’s, I think, a very good argument to be made that if children learn to write on paper, they will access that artistic, intuitive, more creative side of their brain while they’re writing a story, writing a report, writing a poem. And to bypass that entirely by saying, well, let’s just teach everybody to type everything because nobody writes on paper anymore, it’s really depriving them of the opportunity of developing that part of the brain that could be so valuable later on. Uh, so we are actually seeing a swing back. And Sandy, you probably know this, but the the fastest growing subset of education of alternative education right now are classical charter schools. That’s the fastest growing thing happening in the country. And a lot of these schools are no computers in the classroom until high school, you know, like almost a radical stance. But what they find is that, you know, kids, kids learn fast. You know, the the only way to prevent a kid from learning something is to prevent them. If you give them opportunity and time, they can they can learn to spell, they can learn handwriting, they can learn beautiful handwriting. Obviously, there’s the occasional very dyslexic, dysgraphic kid for whom it’s gonna be harder. That doesn’t mean they can’t learn it. But children can can definitely learn to write on paper. And I would argue that doesn’t hinder their ability to use computers at all. Um, if anything, it’s gonna make them more artistic if they make a conversion to writing on a keyboard, on a screen, because in their mind, they’ll still be connected with that part of the developed brain rather than the tragedy of kids who really never learn to write on paper. The school is more concerned about them passing the standardized tests that have to be taken on a computer in fourth grade than teaching them how to write, write and spell nicely.
Dr. Amy Moore: 31:41
Well, it goes back to the memorization piece as well. We encode um information differently when we put it in our own handwriting than if we use our phone or a laptop or a tablet. And so because it is engaging multiple areas of the brain, right? There, we’re engaging not only the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, um, but we’re engaging this cerebellum, which is responsible for coordinating movement and the parietal lobe for handwriting. I mean, and so when you’re engaging that much of your brain, we are going to encode it differently. And so I think if we think about, um, I wrote my entire master’s thesis by hand and then typed it. And so again, this was in the 90s.
Andrew Pudewa: 32:27
So Yeah, you just don’t look old enough to have had to do that.
Dr. Amy Moore: 32:31
But yeah. But I did I that’s how I operated, right? Like it to me, the pencil was how I got my thoughts onto paper best. Um and maybe it was a an element of creativity that you were just talking about as well. So I think it’s a a a lost art that we can’t lose.
Andrew Pudewa: 32:56
Do you know that C.S. Lewis wrote everything he wrote on paper with a fountain pen?
Dr. Amy Moore: 33:03
I learned that reading your book. I did not know that prior.
Andrew Pudewa: 33:08
Yeah, I mean, there were typewriters. He could have typed, but no. Um, and there is something I think about writing on paper. We’re more invested, are we not? Like if you’re gonna write something and you’re gonna take the time to put it on paper, you’re also more likely to kind of say the sentence in your mind, hear what you think you’re gonna write, evaluate it. Is it the right word in the right place? Is it balanced? Does it sound good? And kind of rehearse it before you write it on paper. Whereas I know I do this when you’re typing, it’s just like whatever, you know, stream of consciousness. But then editing stream of consciousness is is almost more work than having thought it through a little more carefully before you write it down. So there’s that aspect of intentionality and care as well.
Sandy Zamalis: 34:03
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Dr. Amy Moore: 35:05
So there was something interesting in your bio where you say that you have transformed reluctant writers. How have you done that? Like why are children reluctant writers? And what is the what is the answer to that?
Andrew Pudewa: 35:23
I love that. Um if you were to find a kid who doesn’t like writing, I’m sure you’ve met some, and if you ask them why do you dislike writing, they will give you tautologies and say, because it’s hard, because I don’t like it, because blah, blah, blah. They’ll basically get to the point where they’ll say, Well, I don’t know what to do, right? You know, I’m sure anyone who’s dealt with kids for any length of time has heard a kid say, I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to say. I can’t think of anything. And so the reason there is that they’re overwhelmed with the complexity of the process. And uh for about the last 50 years, the teaching of writing in schools has been increasingly moving toward writing as an act of spontaneous self-expression rather than a skill to be learned through a process uh or a program. And so a lot of kids, their experiences, here’s blank paper, just write about your experience, write whatever you want, and they just can’t do it. And if they do do anything, they look at what they did and say, well, that’s awful. And then they hate it even more because it is awful, because they didn’t know. And so part of our success really has been to just take a whole step back and understand the process. So to walk you through it very briefly, to write anything, to write something, first thing that has to happen is you have to have an idea. If there’s no idea, there’s nothing to write. So there’s this act of finding an idea. Now, ideas can pre-exist inside the memory and imagination, or they can pre-exist outside in a more immediate way. So if I said to you, uh, write about the last trip you took with your family, I’m expecting you to go into memory and imagination and pull out sensory impressions, affix words to those sensory impressions, and then put them into a sequence that approximates for the reader some little aspect of your memory and experience. If I said to you, write about the room you are in right now, that would be a very different thing because you could kind of look around and see what’s here and describe stuff, and that might peak a memory or a thought, or there’d be associations and connections, but it would be a much easier task because it’s immediate and available. The second differentiation can be this ideas can pre-exist in words, or they can pre-exist primarily in sensory impressions. A couple examples. If I said to you, please write about your dog or your pet or whatever you would dog you wish you had, I’m asking you to kind of re-experience that dog and then find words that will attach to it, which is hard because dogs don’t talk. And for most children, dogs are about, you know, emotional. It’s a visceral. You you wrestle with your dog, you play with your dog, you lick it, it licks you, you, you know, you you run with it. You do all of these really kind of physical and emotional things with a dog. So it’s hard for a child to then find the words to affix to that that can even come close to the intensity of the experience they have. Whereas, if I said, uh, write down your favor your favorite uh Bible story or Aesop fable, okay. That came to you in words. So when you go to access that, it’s in words. So putting it back into words is much easier. So the easiest place to start when teaching writing to children, especially reluctant ones, is to start with something which is immediate. It’s right here. I don’t have to go look in my memory, and it pre-exists in words. And so in our IEW system, as Sandy knows, we start with source text and keyword outlines, and then we move on from there through the process of asking increasingly difficult questions. So, you know, in the beginning, what are the keywords in the sentence? How do you make a sentence out of those keywords? It goes from text into text. Then later, put a story in the mind. How do you pull the story out of the mind? You ask yourself the questions. Who’s in the story? When and where did it happen? What is the problem? What are they thinking, feeling, saying, or doing? How is it resolved? And then we move all the way up in our unit seven and eight into what you know the world might call creative writing. I don’t like that term too much because there’s so much baggage associated with creative writing. We actually use the term inventor. Writing. And that’s really interesting if you study the Latin root of the words. So the word creative or create is from the Latin verb creo, which means I create. It’s the one that’s used in the Latin translation of Genesis. In the beginning, God created from nothing the heavens and the earth. We don’t do that so much. But in classical rhetoric and in the way we teach it, we use the word inventive, which comes from the Latin verb invenio, which means to find or discover. So you don’t make something from nothing, you find something you got, and then through combination of permutation, you invent, you create, you come up with something that’s unique. And so that that co-creation idea um so uh that’s why we say inventive writing rather than creative writing. But uh for most children, uh you think about the process. Okay, you gotta find an idea, you’ve got to speak it into existence, you’ve got to hear what you heard yourself say to yourself, right? And for some children, even that’s hard. I bet you’ve met kids who talk and don’t hear what they just said, right? So you have to hear what you heard yourself say to yourself, then you have to hold that in your memory long enough to go and wrestle the technical information of how to spell the words, what order to put them, punctuation mechanics, and then one more nasty task after that, you have to read what you wrote and compare that with the idea you started with and see if they match closely enough that it’s acceptable. So if there’s a breakdown anywhere in that process, either through the, you know, the the pedagogical process of doing it or a neurological impediment to any part of that process, they they just lose it and they get lost in the middle and they don’t know what to do, and they are overwhelmed. So to answer that, there’s a long answer to your short question. How do you get kids to not be reluctant writers or to actually be able to do it more easily? You have to stop them from being overwhelmed by the process by breaking it into the smallest possible accomplishable steps.
Sandy Zamalis: 43:01
I love that. That is so in our wheelhouse of how we do everything.
unknown: 43:08
Yeah.
Dr. Amy Moore: 43:09
Well, I think A, you use what you know about the brain. Um, and B, the idea is so simple to say, simple but complex, obviously, but it’s so simple to say, hey, if we just did it this way, look how far we can go.
unknown: 43:29
Right.
Sandy Zamalis: 43:30
Yeah. And I think as parents, sometimes we get caught up in the in uh, like you say, Andrew, the product and we forget about the process. And so learning as a parent, one of the things I love about you is you do a great job of encouraging the parent. Um, yes, you’ve got this great curriculum, but it’s really about training the parent and how to train this process because we have to unlearn a lot of bad habits ourselves in order to truly understand and break it down. Because we’re we, you know, we write and we read, but sometimes we can’t always translate that into how to train it, how to build it from the grassroots forward.
Andrew Pudewa: 44:07
Well, and it’s interesting, sometimes the best musicians don’t make the best teachers for beginners or kids who are struggling. If you’re really good at something, and you know, like the natural writer, you meet people say, I I don’t know, I’ve always been able to do this. They don’t necessarily know how to take what they know how to do and break it into those smaller steps along the way. Uh, and so very often, you know, a person who struggles to learn something can relate to the challenge of teaching it and learning it even better than someone for whom it was easy to begin with.
Dr. Amy Moore: 44:50
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, and I am so sorry that it has to end. Um, we would love it if you would come back and talk some more with us. We didn’t even get to half our questions. I’m like, wait a minute, there’s so much more I want to know from you. Okay, great. So Andrew’s gonna come back and we’re gonna talk some more. And um for now, uh, could you share with our listeners how they can find more from you?
Andrew Pudewa: 45:22
Sure. Yeah. Our website is iew.com. So easy domain, iewte excellence in writing. And uh we have tons of resources. If you were to type my name, andrewpudewa.com, uh, there that website would redirect to a page that has all sorts of talks and articles I’ve written. Uh the book, I think we got you, however imperfectly, uh, that’s available as well. And then if you go to our YouTube, uh IEWTV, uh is a lot of conference talks that have been recorded and are available, no cost. And if you want to buy writing curriculum, we’ll sell you something too.
Sandy Zamalis: 46:02
Fantastic. You’re on TikTok too. I’m gonna promote you there too, because you do some awesome videos on TikTok as well.
Andrew Pudewa: 46:10
Yes, my youngest daughter, who is 26, she’s the one who said, Dad, you gotta get on TikTok. That’s where all the young moms are. All right. I can do that.
Sandy Zamalis: 46:23
Yeah, you have you’ve got great content. So I encourage our listeners to go there because you talk about all this brain-based kind of learning um information for parents there as well. And so what’s your TikTok handle?
Andrew Pudewa: 46:36
Um, just my name, Andrew Pudewa.
Dr. Amy Moore: 46:38
Okay, fantastic. Andrew, thank you so much for being with us today. I know our listeners are gonna have amazing takeaways, and we’re excited to talk some more with you. Listeners, we will put all the links that Andrew just shared uh with you in our show notes. We love it that you chose to spend this hour with us uh like you do every week. If you want more from us, you can find us on social media at TheBrainy Moms. You can find our website at theBrainymoms.com where you can sign up to get our new monthly newsletter. Um, and you can find Sandy on TikTok at the Brain Trainer Lady. That is all we have for you today. We hope you feel a little bit smarter after spending this hour with us. Catch you next time.