No Pain No Gain

I am not against corporeal punishment. I think that giving a child a good whoopin' can be an effective way to teach discipline. I have even considered the behavior of my peers and thought to myself "I bet you would have turned out better if your parents beat you when you were younger." That said, I also believe that it must be difficult to properly administer corporeal punishment correctly. The problem is when it stops being about discipline and starts being about whenever you, the parent, happen to be upset. I also think that I just don't have what it take to beat My Future Kids properly, so I guess they dodged a bullet there. Or something.
Anyway, what I will do to punish My Future Kids is this: whenever they have wronged either me or someone else, they are writing a formal letter of apology. I don't care if they can't write yet or if they can't even read. They will write that letter if I have to spell out every single word for them. They will explain what they did, why they did it, why it was wrong, and say if they are sorry. I won't actually make them say that they are sorry, because maybe they aren't. I'm not going to have them lie.
Hopefully this will serve the dual purpose of letting them understand why what they did was wrong and also get them to write well. I will not tolerate a letter of apology with spelling or grammar errors, regardless of their literacy at the time. Oh, and they're writing it by hand, so every time I have them correct a mistake, they will need to rewrite the entire thing.