What young writers get right (that professionals often don't)
After months of editing student submissions from across the country, I noticed something that surprised me: youth writers have an advantage professionals rarely talk about.
There's a version of the "youth voice" conversation that treats young writers as apprentices — people who have important things to say but need adult editors to make the work actually publishable. I want to argue for a different version.
After several months of editing submissions to The Journal for Youth Voice from writers across the country — pieces on philosophy, geopolitics, AI ethics, history, robotics — I've noticed something that surprised me: student writers are often doing something that professional columnists lose.
They believe the question is actually open.
When a professional writer publishes on, say, the ethics of AI in academic settings, they almost always have a prior position. Their argument is constructed around a conclusion they've already reached. The writing is advocacy dressed as inquiry.
The best student pieces I've edited are genuinely trying to figure something out. The argument develops in front of the reader because the writer is developing it in real time. There are places where they're unsure — and the good ones say so. This creates a different quality of intellectual honesty that readers can sense even when they can't name it.
The second thing young writers get right: they take the question seriously at face value.
A piece about who would be the author of an AI-written essay doesn't need to do the work of seeming important — the writer treats it as important because to them, it is. They're the first generation of students navigating AI tools in school in real time. Their relationship to the question is immediate, not theoretical.
That urgency shows up in the writing. It's not a rhetorical move. It's real.
What professional writers often do better: structure, evidence handling, and knowing when to stop. These are learnable skills. The quality of genuine curiosity — the willingness to follow a question without already knowing the answer — is rarer and harder to develop once lost.
My job as an editor, at its best, is to protect the curiosity while strengthening the craft. Those two things don't have to be in tension.
About the role: National Student Editor, The Journal for Youth Voice
As a National Student Editor, I review and shape monthly student-authored articles from contributors across the country — spanning AI ethics, philosophy, geopolitics, robotics, and history — while managing the full editorial cycle from submission to publication. The standard is deliberately high: I hold national student voices to a rigorous editorial bar, because serious ideas deserve serious editing.
Published samples I've edited
Two pieces that show the range of what lands on my desk — a philosophy-of-authorship essay and a close reading of Argentine politics:
1. Who would be the author of an AI-written essay?
2. Milei's polling decline, Peronism and its stagnation, and the reappearance of the center-right
About The Journal for Youth Voice
TJYV is a student-run national online publication with a sharp mission: to give youth a platform to express themselves constructively by publishing serious student writing on policy, philosophy, and global issues that most outlets won't touch. Editing there means taking young writers as seriously as the questions they're asking.