Sorry, Natalie, I didn’t understand which part was moot, exactly.

But I’m not disagreeing with you. My point was that teachers, the good ones, should already be coaching good writing habits at the time kids are learning parts of speech, and it’s from constant iteration and practice that those grammar rules stick. But therein lies the rub, there’s only so much you can make kids learn or care about at one time, considering everything else they have to learn first for the ideas to make sense, and against other interest.

I’m trying to look at it from the point of view of my kids, who are 8 and 9. Despite already learning a third language in school (another lucky privilege, I guess, due to having a French mother, American father, and living by the German border), they nevertheless prefer toys over reading a book, and prefer Minecraft on the iPad over verb conjugation on paper. They’re just happy when they complete their homework at all, and frankly we are too. ;)

Between the time of first learning to read and write to actually entering the working world, there’s a lot of life distraction. It’s hard to stay on top of writing sharply, for the sake of craft. I certaily didn’t do it. I had to relearn. Even your dissertation shows we always improve if we focus on it ourselves. Only a few people ever really do by desire, having a particular interest for it, and they tend to be the ones who end up providing the writing services, or writing best-selling books. Whatever.

I guess I would only ask as reflection, at what age do you think young people should start getting special training about writing plainly/simply? What constitutes “plain” and “simple”? And how would that instruction be different from learning to write correctly, as teachers should already be approaching it?