By Abi | Home Star Tuition | Writing tuition for children from international families
Show don’t tell is probably the most repeated piece of writing advice in existence. Teachers say it. Writing guides are full of it. And yet, in my experience, it is one of the least well explained – particularly to children. Most children have heard it. Far fewer actually understand what it means, or how to do it.
This post is about what show don’t tell actually is, why it matters, how to explain it to a child in a way that makes sense, and how to practise it so that it becomes a natural part of how they write.
What Show Don’t Tell Actually Means
At its simplest, show don’t tell is the difference between naming an emotion and creating the conditions in which the reader feels it.
Telling: She was nervous.
Showing: She pressed her thumbnail into her palm and stared at the floor.
Both sentences communicate that the character is nervous. But they do very different things. The first gives the reader information. The second gives the reader an experience. The reader of the second sentence does not need to be told that the character is nervous – they feel it, in the small specificity of that gesture.
This is what showing does. It trusts the reader to draw the conclusion. It creates an image, a sensation, a detail – and it allows the reader’s imagination to do the work of interpretation. That act of interpretation is what makes reading feel alive.
Telling has its place – not every moment in a piece of writing needs to be shown in full, and attempting to show everything produces writing that is exhausting and slow. But the most vivid, memorable moments in any piece of writing are almost always moments of showing. They are where the writing stops summarising and starts creating.
Why Children Find It Difficult
Most children, when they write, default to telling. This is natural. Telling is efficient. It gets the information across. And for much of their school lives, children are rewarded for communicating clearly and directly – in maths, in science, in factual writing of all kinds. The instinct to state rather than suggest is deeply ingrained.
There is also a confidence element. Showing requires a child to trust that the reader will understand what they are trying to convey without being told explicitly. That trust – the willingness to be indirect, to suggest rather than state – is something that many children need to develop deliberately. It can feel risky, and children who are uncertain about their writing tend to play it safe.
And for multilingual children in particular, showing can feel especially daunting. When a child is not yet fully confident in the language, stating something directly feels safer than reaching for a specific image or sensory detail that might not come out quite right.
How to Explain It to a Child
The explanations that work best with primary-age children are always concrete and experiential. Abstract descriptions of the technique – “use sensory detail”, “create images” – do not land nearly as well as a direct, vivid demonstration.
Here is an approach I use regularly in lessons.
I ask the child to think of a feeling – excitement, fear, boredom, embarrassment – and to write one sentence that tells me they feel it. Most children produce something like: I was so excited. or He was really scared.
Then I ask: what does that feeling do to your body? What do your hands do? Your stomach? Your face? Does the room look different? Does time speed up or slow down?
We talk through the answers together. And then I ask the child to write the feeling again – this time without using the word at all.
What emerges is almost always more interesting than what came before. My hands wouldn’t stay still. I kept checking the door. That is a child showing. They have not used the word excited once, and yet it is entirely present.
This moment – when a child realises what they have just done – is one of the most satisfying in writing teaching. They can feel the difference between the two sentences. And once they can feel it, they can begin to choose it.
Specific Techniques to Practise
Once the concept is understood, the following techniques help children practise showing in their own writing.
The body technique. When a character is feeling something, write what happens to their body. Hands, eyes, stomach, breathing, posture. Physical detail is one of the most reliable routes into showing emotion. Children who struggle to find images often find it much easier when they think physically.
The action technique. Show what a character does rather than how they feel. Actions carry enormous emotional weight when chosen carefully. She closed the door quietly implies something very different from She slammed it. The emotion is in the action.
The sensory technique. What does the character see, hear, smell, taste, touch? Sensory detail places the reader inside the experience. It is the difference between The kitchen smelled of cooking and The air was thick with the smell of garlic and something burned at the edges of a pan. The second is specific. Specificity is almost always the key.
The slowing down technique. Showing takes more words than telling. A moment that is told in one sentence might take a paragraph to show properly. Children who are learning to show need to understand that slowing down at the important moments is not a weakness – it is where the writing comes alive.
A Word About When to Tell
It is important to be honest with children about this: telling is not wrong. It is a legitimate and necessary part of writing. A story that attempts to show every single moment would be unreadable.
Telling is useful for moving quickly through time, for providing context, for transitioning between scenes. It keeps the writing moving. The skill is not to eliminate telling but to choose – to know which moments deserve to be shown in full and which can be summarised and moved past.
I teach children to think of showing as a spotlight. You cannot keep the spotlight on everything. But you can choose the moments that deserve it – the emotionally significant moments, the turning points, the details that will stay with the reader – and give those moments the full attention of showing.
Why This Matters for Entrance Exams
Show don’t tell is one of the qualities that examiners at selective independent schools notice most clearly – and comment on most often when writing is strong. A child who can create a feeling rather than simply name it, who can make a reader experience a moment rather than simply understand it, produces writing that is genuinely memorable.
For 11+ and 13+ creative writing papers, this is not an optional refinement. It is one of the central skills being assessed. Children who have practised it consistently – who have made it a natural part of how they approach a writing task – have a significant advantage over those who are aware of the technique but have not yet internalised it.
The technique takes time to develop fully. But it responds quickly to the right kind of teaching – particularly teaching that is practical, example-based, and rooted in the child’s own writing rather than abstract instruction.
Practising at Home
If you would like to practise this with your child at home, here is a simple exercise that works well for ages 8 to 14.
Write these emotions at the top of five separate pieces of paper: nervous, proud, lonely, excited, angry. For each one, ask your child to write three to five sentences that convey the emotion without using the word itself, or any direct synonym. No “happy” for excited, no “worried” for nervous. Only images, actions, sensory details and physical responses.
Read each one aloud together. Discuss which details feel most vivid and why. This kind of conversation – talking about what works and why – is as valuable as the writing itself.
Getting Support
If your child is working towards a creative writing entrance exam, or if you would simply like to help them develop a more vivid, confident writing style, I would be very glad to help.
I work online via Zoom/Voov/Dingtalk with children aged 7 to 14 from international families, across all time zones. I offer a free initial consultation for all new families.
Abi is a Cambridge-educated, specialist writing tutor working with children from international families. She offers tailored online writing tuition and entrance exam preparation online, across all time zones, for children aged 7 to 14.
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