Writing Skills: How to Teach Recount Writing to Children or Freelancers

A review of your own writing skills can help you to teach recount writing to others. Who would you teach recount writing to? Perhaps it may be children, but it can be other freelance writers.

What is recount writing?

The Free Merriam Webster Dictionary defines the word recount as “to relate in detail”, “to count again” and as “a second or fresh count”.  

What is recount writing?

The article “Recount writing” suggests that it entails “the recounting or retelling of past events to inform or entertain the reader” and lists important features of recount writing.

Recount writing takes on narrative form, as it retells chronological events or experiences in response to the question, “What happened?” 

Recounting events and experiences is something everyone learns how to do from early childhood onward. As children and freelance writers begin to develop their writing skills, they develop their recount writing skills.

When it comes to recount writing skills, learning how to recount happenings in writing is not always easy. 

Most freelance writers recognize that recounting events and experiences in your life or that of others, requires a certain amount of discipline, as well as practice in terms of writing.

Who, why, what, when and where, as well as how much or how many, become the central questions and the focus of recount writing. Accuracy of recounting or retelling and correct chronology of events is vital in terms of credibility.

Writing a sequence of events in point form as they happen, can make recount writing easier. Noting the time and place, presence or absence of individuals in relation to specific events, etc. helps to keep the sequence feasible for the freelance writer. It is much like writing a news report.

Freelance writers teach recount writing to others, knowingly and unknowingly. Their feasibility as writers depends upon their ability to recount events in such a way that a reader can relate to the experiences or events recounted in their writing.

Fiction can become a recounting of actual events or experiences, by changing names of people, etc. 

Accuracy of recounting so that it makes sense to the freelance writer, as well as those who read his or her work, empowers that kind of fiction. Dialogue can be an effective tool in recount writing, as characters take on various roles.

The freelance writer engaged in recount writing uses retelling to his or her advantage when relating life experiences and events in first person or third person, with active voices in past tense.

Recount writing is an art that comes easily to some; for others, it is learned.

This is when learning how to teach recount writing to others becomes important.