Are You Doing Writing Wrong?
You would think that English departments are obsessed with writing.
They’re not. They’re obsessed with methods.
Nearly every English department teaches writing structures. Often it is at sentence, paragraph, and whole text level.
They all have favoured paragraph structures, with mnemonics like PEEL, PETAL, PETER, PRTEZEL, or What, Where, How, Why.
What very few of them do (because I have not seen any of them do) is test these out:
If I write an answer under exam conditions, using these structures, do I write enough to get 100% in the time limit?
Will a good student be able to get a top grade using this structure, or will they end up making too few points to get the grade?
When I look at exemplar answers from the exam board, the top answers from the mocks, and recalled papers, do I see students successfully using these structures, or being successful because they do not use it?
I’ve studied hundreds of top grade answers for every question in English language and literature. That’s where the italics come in. That is what I see.
In English, it is almost as simple as:
The more explanations you write, the higher your mark.
There is a little more to add about thesis statements, conclusions and vocabulary which reflects key concepts, but number of explanations accounts for about 90% of the mark.
If you want to work out how to maximise the impact of writing in your subject, here is my checklist:
If you did all of these things, your students will get much higher grades.
What’s that, you don’t have time?
Fine, most of your students are getting grades 7-9 then, and you don’t need to think about how to get them top grades - they already are.
(Actually, teaching writing this will way will save sooooo much time - but that is another post).