For my mother, writing basically made up the majority of her work. Accordingly, she spent practically a decade of my childhood making sure that I could write.

For my mother, writing basically made up the majority of her work. Accordingly, she spent practically a decade of my childhood making sure that I could write. She nitpicked my essays down to the last word and criticized me both on small-scale issues (e.g. sentence structure and word choice) as well as large-scale issues (structure of an argument, etc). At the time I didn't quite realize how useful this was. As a kid, I was rather annoyed that I had to spend so much time to write short essays. Everything I did was a back-and-forth process between me and her -- in retrospect, rather like a code review. Today, for me, writing is basically second-nature. Even when typing on IRC, if I want to, I can write reasonably well without putting much effort into it. The most surprising discovery for me as an adult was that this isn't normal -- that, particularly outside of our community here, most people really can't write without significant effort. From my perspective today, those years of nitpicking school writing assignments were the single most useful thing my parents did for me, and if I raise kids, I will ensure that I do the same to them. One consistent observation I've made over the years is that the highest concentration of "good writers my age" during childhood was to be found in school scifi/fantasy writing clubs, text-based RPs such as MUSHs, and so forth. I don't know which direction the relationship goes in however: do such activities attract good writers, or do people become good writers through them? Or is it both?