# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Using putty for hand strength and dexterity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Using pegs for hand strength dexterity and tripod grasp

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Handwriting - Using textured fabric for sensory experiences and practising shapes and letters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Using textured balls for hand strength, hand sprain, tactile discrimination & tactile defensiveness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Using plasticine for hand strength and pencil control

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning Through Movement - Handwriting Warm Up 2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning Through Movement - Handwriting Warm Up 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Occupational Therapy Treatment for Handwriting Difficulties - The OT Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Talk for Writing in the Virtual Classroom - Warming up language and games

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thank you for visiting Tes Magazine. The article or page that you are looking for, along with thousands of other articles from our archive, is in the process of being migrated to the new Tes Magazine experience.

While this process is being completed, please visit our new homepage for the latest in education news and features.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thank you for visiting Tes Magazine. The article or page that you are looking for, along with thousands of other articles from our archive, is in the process of being migrated to the new Tes Magazine experience. While this process is being completed, please visit our new homepage for the latest in education news and features.

# data[].attributes.body
Reluctant Writers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Strategies for the Reluctant Writer | LD Topics | LD OnLine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LD OnLine is the leading website on learning disabilities, learning disorders and differences. Parents and teachers of learning disabled children will find authoritative guidance on attention deficit disorder, ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, dysnomia, reading difficulties, speech and related disorders.

# data[].attributes.body
Reluctant Writers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
← Are You Celebrating International Book Giving Day? Monday's Muse: What Do Music and Writer's Voice Have In Common? →

In a research paper conducted by Paul Gardner, teachers identified a range of characteristics that were common to reluctant writers. I certainly recognise characteristics of both of my children in this list, at various stages of their development. (I hate to admit it, but I also recognise myself in this list too!) Although we think of children who struggle with literacy belonging to this group, reluctant writers are found right across the developmental spectrum of any classroom or group.

A reluctant writer may:

be good at telling stories orally but has difficulty putting ideas on paper independently.

be a perfectionist, therefore fear of getting it wrong prevents writing.

lack ideas due to insufficient experiences either in their life or their knowledge of reading and stories.

find writing a physical struggle - poor fine motor control/pencil control.

find spelling difficult which then impedes writing.

have 'internalised a view of writing as a set of grammar and language rules rather than a creative process.

have difficulty remembering what s/he is writing about (memory be an issue).

be unable to build upon their writing.

quickly start and finish their writing but do not develop ideas so the plot is often superficial.

prefer to play it safe with their writing and is reluctant to take risks.

Here Are Four Pre Writing Strategies to Support Reluctant Writers:
Pre- writing and planning are two of the most important stages of creative writing and it's here, at the beginning of the process, that we can really set the stage and encourage young writers to enjoy playing with ideas.
1) Use Mind Maps to Generate Story Ideas
Mind mapping (made famous by Tony Buzan) allows children to record their ideas through the use of symbols, pictures and language. Mind mapping as a pre-writing activity engages both the creative and logical elements of the brain and gives children a chance to experiment with ideas and possible outcomes. The idea is to explore as many ideas as possible - some will work, some may not, but all ideas are accepted into the mix. Mind maps combined with paired peer discussion enable writers to both record and share their ideas through storytelling. I have found this to be most effective. If you're interested in learning more about mind mapping for children, head over to Draw Me An idea for some interesting examples.
2) Encourage Storyboarding to Visualise and Structure a Story
Creating storyboards helps children visualise how their story might unfold. This is a vital skill for storytellers. Once you 'enter' into the world of your story, your imagination and sensory perception are called into play. Your right brain loosens up a little. Storyboarding is a great planning tool, especially if the physical act of writing is difficult. Langwitches Blog has a great post about storyboarding and the writing process
3) Create Word Banks to Build Vocabulary
Both storyboards and mind maps use words and phrases to capture ideas and thoughts. These words can be shared and collected to create a word bank for the class or for individual students. This is especially helpful for children who need assistance with extending vocabulary and/or spelling.
4) Provide Storytelling Models to Provide Structure
Providing a template or a storytelling model can sometimes provide a solid structure for writing. Rather than limiting creativity, it allows some students to soar because it reduces anxiety and the pressure of developing all the elements of a story at once. A good example of this is found in a pre writing activity we did at The Writer's Club last term. Using the storytelling model of 'The Gingerbread Man', pairs had to:

create a new character made out of something unusual

think of a reason the character might want to run away

name three people that might chase this character

decide how will the story end

Rather than inhibiting the creative process, providing a template such as this, actually produced some hilarious and very creative innovations on the original story.

Finally let's be mindful of the learning environment we create for children. Writing is a complex process, bringing together a number of sub-skills such as spelling, syntax, vocabulary, fine motor control etc. In Year 3, my daughter Neve was in a classroom where spelling and grammar were the Gods of any writing task. Neve, a competent and creative writer, struggled with spelling, so she wrote very simple stories that year. She wanted to spend her lunch break outside, rather than in her classroom correcting and rewriting her work. "I like writing stories", she told me, "but I love the monkey bars!!" Let's aim to create positive and balanced learning environments that support and inspire young wordsmiths, to take risks and enjoy the journey, that is creative writing.

This article and more can be found in my free E - Book - Storytelling and Creative Writing Inspiration.

Check out the link to download this: http://www.writeawaywithme.com/workshops/free-resources/

If you found this article helpful, please share it with your friends and colleagues or leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you.

Leave a Reply

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Four Great Strategies To Inspire Reluctant Writers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
← Are You Celebrating International Book Giving Day? Monday's Muse: What Do Music and Writer's Voice Have In Common? → In a research paper conducted by Paul Gardner, teachers identified a range of characteristics that were common to reluctant writers. I certainly recognise characteristics of both of my children in this list, at various stages of their development.

# data[].attributes.body
Reluctant Writers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Written by Holly (Teach Starter)
Posted Monday July 11, 2016

"It's so important for boys to find a topic that interests them before they pick up a pen and start writing. I wasn't particularly interested in writing at school, I only started to enjoy it later on, but I was hampered by being fantastically slow." - Simon Mayo

A few years ago I taught a very boy heavy Year 2 class. As the weeks went by it become evident that I had a lot of switched on boys who hated, and I mean loathed, writing! Their eyes would roll and I would hear a harmonious groan as I uttered the words...'get out your writing books'.

After this negative response, I researched and changed how I approached writing in the classroom. It became evident that the strategies I began to use, helped not only the reluctant boys to improve their writing, but the rest of the class also.

This blog article will outline a few different ideas and strategies that worked for me. Of course, each class is different, however I feel obliged to share these ideas with my fellow teaching companions.

1. Talk about writing

I found having an open discussion about what it is they disliked about writing to be a huge eye opener.

Most of them said they found it hard to think of ideas and would often feel worried and anxious about getting the task done before play time. This fear before a writing task is completely normal - it's writer's block that even the best authors talk about. On top of this, they have the added time constraints that teachers place on their students.

I wanted to encourage daily writing and help move them past their writer's fear. Also, I explained that it is 'normal' to feel anxious about writing, and we began to work out strategies, find templates and slowly created the right level of support needed for each student in the class. Including the children in this process gave them greater drive to want to improve their own writing.

2. Is writing comfortable?

I found the boys that had great ideas but only ended up with one sentence at the end of a one hour writing block, struggled with handwriting and had a poor pencil grip. We experimented with different pencil grips, triangular shaped pencils and practiced handwriting daily to improve this. Check out our 10 Handy Handwriting Tips Blog for more ideas.

Creating a comfortable writing environment was also beneficial to some boys in my class. Some preferred to sit on bean bags to write, whilst others felt more comfortable sitting at a round table with a teacher or teacher aide for support. To me, it didn't bother me how they were sitting, just that they were comfortable and writing!

3. Comic strips

The boys in my class were into comic books at the time. We were in the beginning stages of a narrative writing unit and they were struggling with what to write, who to write about and then there was the narrative structure to think about. I used comic strips to begin the writing process. The boys loved it, they planned out a comic strip and then used the comic strip as a plan for their full narrative. The end results were amazing! The girls enjoyed it just as much.

Here are some of our resources that may work in your classroom:

4. Writing prompts

The initial fear of knowing what to write can be a big hurdle for boys, and children in general, to overcome. Some children need a little push in the right direction. Providing them with some writing ideas/prompts can help them to get creative.

Here are some of our resources that are great for providing that extra support:

5. Create story boxes

I created 'story boxes' using items I knew the boys were interested in. Superheros were a favourite at the time. Using our classroom theme packs you can print, laminate and cut out pictures and word wall cards to help inspire your students' writing ideas.

Other topics that worked for me were cars, dinosaurs, sports and action movies. I also encouraged children to create their very own story box that they filled with things from home that were special to them.

5. Are they bored?

A couple of the boys in my class hated writing because they found it boring. The topics we were asking them to write about did not interest them so they didn't feel compelled to write.

Providing a variety of options and topics allowed the students to pick a topic that interested them. This is where the story boxes from home allowed the boys to write about hobbies and interests they enjoyed writing about.

The boys were proud of their work and a lot more willing to share the ideas and writing with the rest of the class.

6. 10-minute daily quick write

One strategy I found helped the boys overcome that anxious writer's block was the '10-minute quick write'.

I would set a timer and then engage the students to write continuously for 10 minutes without editing, deleting, crossing out or stopping. If they got stuck, they just wrote about what they are thinking.

The writing was not marked, it was simply an exercise to help students intentionally move past that fear of coming up with ideas. Check out our online Random Sentence Starter selector. A great morning activity to get your students writing daily.

7. Use technology in the classroom

Another hurdle that became evident was the number of things they had to think about while writing. What the story was going to be about, what characters were going to be in the story, who was the main character, what was the problem and the solution, spelling, handwriting, punctuation, don't forget your adjectives...so many different things for their little minds to handle.

I found allowing them to record their ideas on recording devices or iPads and allowing them to type their ideas and plan their stories on a computer, eliminated the handwriting concern from the scenario. It allowed them to focus on the quality of the story and content, rather than the neatness of their handwriting.

I hope this blog article has inspired some of you to get creative when it comes to encouraging those reluctant writers in the classroom. It's easy to say 'Jonny just doesn't like writing' and expecting that. There are so many different strategies, resources and ideas out there...just work out the ones that work for Jonny.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Ways to Guide and Inspire Reluctant Children to Write - Teach Starter Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Written by Holly (Teach Starter) Posted Monday July 11, 2016 "It's so important for boys to find a topic that interests them before they pick up a pen and start writing. I wasn't particularly interested in writing at school, I only started to enjoy it later on, but I was hampered by being fantastically slow."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Instead of groans at the beginning of a writing lesson, your class were excited to pick up their pencils and you were the teacher that sparked their imaginations!

Even your most reluctant writers are generating adventurous vocabulary, perfecting punctuation and filling the page with no signs of stopping!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Access a free inspiring image, story starter and short burst writing activities, every day! Inspire your most reluctant writers and improve writing stamina

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to The Literacy Shed - the home of visual literacy. Here at Literacy Shed we aim to provide teachers with high quality films and animations that can be used in the primary classroom to enhance the teaching of reading and writing. All of the films on the site we think are suitable for primary aged children although some films may not be suitable for younger children. We urge that teachers watch any films before showing them to children.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A website for teachers filled with ideas for literacy teaching using visual resources such as film, animation, photographs and picture books.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Storybird - Read, write, discover, and share the books you'll always remember.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Become a better writer with Storybird's creativity tools. Online courses, challenges, and reader feedback will help you improve your writing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What is Talk for Writing?

Talk for Writing is an engaging teaching framework developed by Pie Corbett, supported by Julia Strong. It is powerful because it is based on the principles of how children learn. It enables children to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally, before reading and analysing it, and then writing their own version.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Outstanding Teacher Training - Talk for Writing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Talk for Writing is an engaging teaching framework developed by Pie Corbett, supported by Julia Strong. It is powerful because it is based on the principles of how children learn. It enables children to imitate the language they need for a particular topic orally, before reading and analysing it, and then writing their own version.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD with no ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As part of our ongoing work on building a Writing For Pleasure pedagogy, we have been reflecting on the second principle of our Writing For Pleasure manifesto:
High Expectations: Seeing Every Child As A Writer (2) Effective writing teachers hold high achievement expectations for all writers. They see all children as writers and, from the first, teach strategies that lead to greater independence. They make the purposes and audiences for writing clear to children for both their class and personal writing projects. They teach what writing can do. They also promote the social aspects of writing and peer support in their classrooms.
What do you need to consider as a teacher to ensure you are creating an inclusive environment where all apprentice writers can flourish?

By reading, amongst others, Gadd's wonderful work on what is critical in the effective teaching of writing, we are able to offer some questions that might be worth reflecting on below. If you've written about children being writers yourself or would like to contribute, you're welcome to use the comments section below.

Finally, at the end, we have provided references which are great reading if ensuring every child is a writer sounds like something you'd like to learn more about.
How do you make children feel like writers in your classroom?

Establish positive relationships with all learners (Burchinal et al 2002; Cornelius-White, 2007).

Allow all children an opportunity to share, perform and/or publish their writing products (including class and personal writing projects) with their peers.

Employ mixed-ability, interest-based groupings and opportunities for sharing and for the discussion of writing amongst peers.

Believe that despite their circumstances, all children have interests, passions and idiosyncrasies which contribute to their funds of knowledge and that these funds of knowledge can be used by children in their writing (Dyson, 2003; Grainger, et al 2013; Leung & Hicks, 2014).

Tend to believe more strongly than other teachers that all learners can achieve if they receive appropriate support from the teacher.

How do your class writing projects make every child feel like a writer?

Plan writing projects to ensure children have some ownership and agency over their project.

Provide opportunities to learn new material.

Give all children challenging writing projects to undertake.

Set up specific writing process goals that all children in the class can achieve.

Monitor the expectations you communicate to learners on a near daily basis.

Ensure a supportive and social learning environment in which to write (children who feel emotionally secure and can communicate effectively with their teachers are better able to devote their energies and attention to writing - Burchinal et al 2002).

Do you have any resources or strategies that help children feel like authentic writers?

Provide writing strategies and helpful writerly advice through verbal feedback (pupil-conferences) to aid children's writing.

Provide instructional strategies and resources which promote self-regulation, greater independence and adoption of a personal writing process.

Give access to high-quality writing examples and a rich classroom library.

How do you model writerly behaviour and how do you talk about writing with your children?

Provide: smiles, head nods, positive body language, eye contact, friendliness, clue giving, repetition, rephrasing, more praise and less criticism to all children.

Talk as writer to writer.

How could a mastery perspective towards writing make children feel more like real writers?

See writing more as mastery through repeated practice and so give children more time, space and opportunities to develop their writing.

As a result of these types of interactions and expectations of children, Cornelius-White (2007) claims that teachers should see an increase in children's participation, initiation into the writing community, satisfaction in their learning, motivation to write, higher self-esteem, and better social connections with their fellow writers.
What can people read to find out more about ensuring every child is a writer? Growth Through English by John Dixon A summary of a great meet up (before twitter meets existed) at Dartmouth between UK and US teachers in the late 1960s. This Dartmouth meet up looked to reflect on the teaching of apprentice writers and is an absolutely fascinating and thought provoking read in today's context. The Myth Of The Deprived Child by Herbert Ginsburg A book which holds the highest possible regard and expectations of children regardless of their circumstances Writing Voices: Creating Communities of Writers by Teresa Cremin & Debra Myhill An absolute must read for anyone interested in creating communities and rich environments for writing to take place. Build a Literate Classroom by Donald Graves The gold standard of creating writers and a writers' classroom! Only £1.17 on Amazon! In The Middle by Nancie Atwell A seminal text on creating a climate for writers to flourish - perfect for KS2 and KS3. No More 'I'm Done' Fostering Independent Writers In The Primary Grades by Jennifer Jacobson A perfect text for creating communities of writers in KS1/LKS2 - really accessible read. Joining the Literacy Club: Further Essays into Education by Frank Smith This text is a bit more heavy going but is infinitely fascinating and thought provoking References:

Burchinal, M., Peisner-Feinberg, E., Pianta R., Howes., C (2002) Development of Academic Skills from Preschool Through Second Grade: Family and Classroom Predictors of Developmental Trajectories In Journal of School Psychology, Vol. 40, No. 5, pp. 415 - 436

Cornelius-White, J., (2007) Learner-Centered Teacher-Student Relationships Are Effective: A Meta-Analysis In Review of Educational Research, Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 113-143

Dyson, A., (2003) Popular Literacies and the 'all' children: rethinking literacy development for contemport childhoods Language Arts 81:100-9

Grainger, T., Goouch, K., Lambirth, A., (2003) Playing the game called writing: children's views and voices. English in Education, 37(2):4-15

Gadd, M., (2014) ' What is critical in the effective teaching of writing? ' The University Of Auckland

Leung, C., Hicks, J., (2014) Writer Identity and Writing Workshop A Future Teacher and Teacher Educator Critically Reflect In Writing & Pedagogy Vol. 6 583-60

Rubie-Davies, C. M. (2010). Teacher expectations and perceptions of student attributes: Is there a relationship? British Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 121-135.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Teachers Do To Make Every Child Feel Like A Writer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As part of our ongoing work on building a Writing For Pleasure pedagogy, we have been reflecting on the second principle of our Writing For Pleasure manifesto: High Expectations: Seeing Every Child As A Writer (2) Effective writing teachers hold high achievement expectations for all writers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There has been a lot of talk around assessing children's writing for a long time now.

Anxiety has been caused as a result of what constitutes independent writing. People are talking about the merits and disadvantages of comparative judgement but I think we are missing the point here. My instinct is that, in all likelihood, we shouldn't be marking individual writing at all. We should be assessing the development of the writer over time. I trialled this in my class last year.

To ensure children could produce writing topics independently, over the course of the year, I taught the children the following self-regulatory strategies:

How to generate ideas for writing independently,

How to plan independently,

Once they had written a draft, how to revise their pieces independently (including looking for opportunities to insert certain linguistic features required by the writing framework - if they saw an appropriate opportunity to do so).

How to proof-read and edit their work.

How to publish their work, focusing on their handwriting.

By teaching these things, when children had finished working on their class-writing project for the day, they were given opportunity to undertake personal projects. This was writing undertaken largely independently (apart from pupil-conferences) using the self-regulating strategies taught above.

I would use these personal writing projects alongside their class projects to make a judgement on how they were developing as an independent writer. To do this, I adapted the CLPE's wonderful, fantastic Writing Scales.

My scales do differ from the CLPE's as I also included:

The typical writerly behaviours you'd expect to see of a child applying at different stages of the writing process.

The grammatical, handwriting, spelling and punctuation features the framework asks to see from writers at a certain age.

I also included more compositional and 'writer behaviour' aspects too. (These proved particularly useful when reporting to parents during parents evening and when writing school reports).

As you can see, they encourage you to look at the child as a writer and at a body of their work when making a judgement on their current development. From this, I was able to state whether I thought a child was emerging, met or exceeding the framework's expectations.

If you'd like to view the writing scales, you are welcome, just send an email to literacyforpleasure@gmail.com

If you'd like to find out more about how to set your children up to write independently you can view our blog post here.

If you'd like to read about our approach to teaching writing called 'Real-World Literacy', you can go here.

Please note: the views expressed on this blog are my own and may not represent my employer. The tenor of this article is to allow the reader to reflect on the assessment of children's writing but is in no way a criticism of any school(s) policy or teachers' practice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Writing Framework: How It Is Possible To Assess Writers And Not Just The Writing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There has been a lot of talk around assessing children's writing for a long time now. Anxiety has been caused as a result of what constitutes independent writing. People are talking about the merits and disadvantages of comparative judgement but I think we are missing the point here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Today we've released the results of our year 5 Sharing Standards project to participating schools. In total, 7,237 pupils from 137 schools across the country completed the project, and 1,574 teachers took part in the judging. We now have results from both year 3 and year 5, allowing us to compare the two year groups. A few days ago we published a blog showing that on average, pupils improve on our writing scale by 32 points between year 3 and year 5: from 490 to 522.

That's all very well, but what does this progress look like?

Here are two scripts which illustrate this difference. One is a median year 3 script, which achieved a scaled score of 490. The second script is a median year 5 script, which achieved a scaled score of 522.

Vocabulary
Previously, I've analysed the difference between scripts by looking at vocabulary and sentence structure. This time, I'd also like to add in a short discussion of text structure.
Sentence structure
I don't think there is a huge vocabulary gulf between the two scripts. The vocabulary in the second script is fairly straightforward, but it is appropriate to the task. The vocabulary in the first script could perhaps benefit from a bit more sophistication and originality, and also from less repetition about the 'special' time machine and asteroid.
Text structure
There's a bigger difference in the way sentences are constructed in these two pieces. The first piece has a few run-on sentences, and the structures are quite basic. There are fewer errors in the second piece, and some more complex structures - for example, lists of both words and clauses.
So how do we get pupils to improve?
I think this is the biggest difference between the two pieces. In the first piece, events just seem to happen one after the other, with the classic 'and then this and then that and then this' structure you often see with young children. It's also quite hard to work out exactly what the relationship is between the various events, who 'We' are, where this is all taking place, etc. By contrast, there is more coherence and overall structure to the second piece. The pupil has organised the material in more of a logical pattern. The paragraphs aren't demarcated perfectly, but each paragraph does have its own theme.

An analysis like the one above is just the first step. I've tried to describe the differences between the scripts, but we also need to explain how such differences come about - and, therefore, how we can help pupils to improve their writing. The risk of presenting scripts by pupils at different ages is that it leads us to assume that pupils will automatically improve just by getting older. Of course maturation will make some difference, but the activities pupils do in class will make a difference too! We don't just want to see comparative judgement used to measure writing. We want it to help improve writing, and we think that analyses like the one above are the first step in that process. We'll blog more about this in the future, but for now, over to you - how can we help pupils improve the quality of their writing? What in-class activities will make the difference?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How does writing improve between year 3 and year 5?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Today we've released the results of our year 5 Sharing Standards project to participating schools. In total, 7,237 pupils from 137 schools across the country completed the project, and 1,574 teachers took part in the judging. We now have results from both year 3 and year 5, allowing us to compare the two year groups.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A couple of weeks ago, a subject leader and I were looking in detail at the spelling of a group of low-attaining pupils in Year 5. All the children were eligible for pupil premium and not making the progress they should. The group were receiving daily phonics catch-up sessions and received a weekly list of spellings to learn. This, it seemed, was not having much impact. So, the subject leader and I decided to analyse the errors in their writing to look for any patterns that might help us to unpick the challenges they were having.

We had analysed the spelling errors for one piece of writing for the group in two stages. First, we sorted them into phonological, morphological or orthographical errors. The phonological errors were errors that showed the children had failed to hear all the sounds in a sequence - for example, writing "gaj", for "garage", or "frist" for "first". We classed errors as orthographic when the child had written something that was phonologically plausible, but not correct - for example, "gud" for "good". Morphological errors included mistakes such as "trappt" for "trapped", where the child has not understood how the word was built up of units of meaning, such as "ed", "ing", or suffixes and prefixes.

Daily spelling lessons

From this first stage, it was easy to see that the majority of the errors were orthographic and morphological. The children were spelling words exactly as they sounded - with no sense of whether it should be written in that way or not. As they were writing, the children were stopping at words they didn't know the spelling of and saying them slowly. They recorded a letter or group of letters for each sound they heard and then carried on writing. Sometimes this resulted in a correct spelling, but often it did not. The same words were spelt in many different ways all the way through a piece of writing.

Having established this, we then moved onto the second stage of looking for spelling patterns the children didn't use. We found lots: double consonants in the middle of words, letter strings that aren't written as they sound, silent letters, and a large group of common exception words.

Once we had worked out the gaps for the children, it became an easy job to plan six weeks of teaching for them. We moved the children away from the daily phonics session they were having to a daily spelling lesson - linked to handwriting, which helped them begin to understand that there is a right way to spell a word.

Not relying on phonics

We showed them how to notice the patterns in words by playing close attention to the sequence of the letters as they were written - and not to just rely on hearing the sounds in the words. We gave them a daily diet of word sorts, got them to identify spelling features in words, to spot spelling patterns - for example, beat, seat, treat and feat - to practise spellings and sentence dictations.

Once we had spent time teaching spelling patterns, we repeated our analysis on a different piece of writing. And the result was that the group have made rapid progress - although they still have a long way to go to meet national curriculum expectations.

It is a strange truth that kids usually learn what we teach them. If they appear to be learning something different, it is often because we have been teaching something different. And if you carry on teaching what you have always taught - phonics, for example - you should not be surprised if you get the same results that you always have: phonetically plausible, incorrect spellings.

The moral of this story: if you want children to learn to spell, teach them what they need to know.
Megan Dixon is director of literacy at the Aspire Educational Trust Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and Instagram, and like Tes on Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'If you want children to learn to spell, teach them spelling - not phonics'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A couple of weeks ago, a subject leader and I were looking in detail at the spelling of a group of low-attaining pupils in Year 5. All the children were eligible for pupil premium and not making the progress they should. The group were receiving daily phonics catch-up sessions and received a weekly list of spellings to learn.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Note - I didn't write this. Yes, I can spell below. Gosh!!! 😝 On my courses, I always train teachers to teach tenses on a timeline! This is a fantastic example of how tenses looks on timelines. It...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sharing Standards involves teachers across the country using Comparative Judgement to judge the writing of pupils from their own school as well as the writing of pupils from other schools. Schools agree to complete a piece of writing with their pupils according to specified conditions. The work is then uploaded where it is anonymised and prepared to be judged.

The teachers of all participating schools judge the writing. The teachers are asked, for a series of pairs of pieces of writing, to select the 'better writing?' The teachers are not provided with criteria on which to base their decisions; rather, we depend on a shared professional understanding of what good writing looks like.

Every piece of writing is judged around 20 times, with the judgements spread across teachers. Comparative Judgement achieves higher reliability than other methods of assessing writing as teachers give very consistent decisions on which is the better piece of writing when presented with two samples. Any individual bias from any single teacher is cancelled out by the aggregation of judgements.

When teachers judge in a national session of Sharing Standards they are asked to make decisions on the work from other schools. Eighty per cent of the judgements teachers make involve comparing the work of their own pupils. The other twenty per cent involves comparing the work of pupils from other schools. Teachers are never asked to directly compare the work of a pupil from their school with a pupil from another school. As a result of this judging pattern, teachers largely determine the rank order of the pupils within their own school, but the relative standard of their pupils compared to pupils in other schools is determined objectively and anonymously.
Year 3 Sharing Standards
For Year 3 we asked pupils to write one page of a narrative under specified conditions. In total, 6,273 pupil from 120 schools across the country completed the project. The sample was representative of the national ability spread in Year 3.

Over one week, 1,393 teachers were involved in making 113,200 judgements on the pupils' writing. The work was judged to a high reliability, with the moderation task judged to a reliability of 0.91.
What does the writing of Year 3 look like?
We use a statistical model to create scaled scores for all pupils from the teachers' judgements. The scale allows us to see what the writing of Year 3 pupils looks like across the scale of ability. Here are a selection of pieces at various points on our scale.

What next?

The year 5 national judging session has now finished, so the next national judging session will be Year 1 and Year 4 in January. Schools need to be signed up by December 8th to take part.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sharing Standards Results: Year 3 - The No More Marking Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sharing Standards involves teachers across the country using Comparative Judgement to judge the writing of pupils from their own school as well as the writing of pupils from other schools. Schools agree to complete a piece of writing with their pupils according to specified conditions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In my last post I discussed evidence that suggests grammar teaching does not lead to an improvement in children's writing. Although it seems implausible that grammar teaching would not be positively correlated with writing outcomes, there's a lot of evidence that is strongly suggestive that what I prefer to believe may not in fact actually be true.

I've written enough about cognitive bias to know that I am predisposed to look for evidence that supports my preferences and dismiss evidence that contradicts them. The point of evidence is that it forces us to confront the extent to which our intuitions map against objective reality, and to that extent at least I feel the need to explore the idea that I might be wrong.

So, although I struggle with the thought that grammatical knowledge would not lead to greater proficiency in writing, I'm willing to accept that grammar teaching may be counter productive for all sorts of reasons. The grammatical concepts may not be carefully sequenced, the teaching itself might be focussed simply on learning meta-linguistic terminology, the teaching could be focussed on performance rather than learning, and so on. Another issue could be opportunity cost. It might be that time spent teaching grammar is time that could be more profitably spent on some other activity more likely to improve children's writing.

Students tend to get a lot of writing practice in school and so, for the opportunity cost argument to work, it would have to be the case that what children spend their time doing in English lessons and elsewhere is more likely to lead to improvement. If, for the moment, we accept that grammar teaching doesn't improve children's writing, there are at least three questions we should consider:
1. Is children's writing as good as we would want it to be?
Broadly, no. Every teacher will know that although some children write wonderfully well, in many cases written responses are wooden, technically inaccurate and do a poor job of expressing complex thoughts. My suspicion is that there is probably be a Matthew Effect in operation; those children who we might describe as 'word-rich' start their school career with a linguistic advantage - they have heard more words, reach more and thus have greater vocabularies and more experience of the written word than their 'word poor' peers. A 1988 study suggests that 9 year olds at the 90th percentile read almost 2.5 million words a year outside of school, whereas a child at the 10th percentile will have been exposed to around 50,000 words. It takes the bottom 10% a whole year what the top 10% read in two days! Those who begin school with this sort of advantage require little in the way of teaching - their ability to write (at least to some extent) is imbibed osmotically from the sheer quantity of written material they encounter. But what of everyone else?

I've suggested before that our ability to write is linked to our ability to speak. We can only write down that which we are able to say. Some children are very good at making connections and explaining their thoughts but struggle to write them down. They are limited to only being able to express their thoughts in spoken language - they're unable to mentally translate into written language because they do not possess the vocabulary and structures of written language. They know that if they wrote down what they have said aloud it would no longer make sense.

Another problem is the embedding of bad habits through poorly constructed writing practice. I call this the capital letter problem. Children often know that their writing is inaccurate or clunky. They know they should use capital letters, spell correctly and avoid punctuation errors but they don't know these things well enough. Anything that occupies out attention reduces our capacity to think. This capacity is strictly limited and if we're juggling complex ideas we wont have much attention left to think about accuracy. Skilled writers will have automatised these basics so that they quite literally don't have to think about them.

I think we can agree that, on average, children's writing is not as good as we would want it to be.
2. What sorts of things do English teachers do to improve children's writing?
English - and by extension writing - tends to get a pretty generous allocation of curriculum time in both primary and secondary schools, and children also practice writing in many other curriculum areas. All this represents a huge opportunity for improving children's writing. So, what do teachers - especially English teachers - spend their time doing?

Greg Ashman has recently written that the teaching of writing is backwards. Typically, students are asked to write something and then, when they make mistakes, teachers spend their time producing a written commentary on how to correct these errors. He suggests that it would be more sensible to give children precise instruction on how to write before asking them to do the writing. This may seem obvious - and many teachers will of course be working hard to model and scaffold writing tasks effectively - but in my experience of working with teachers in a great many different settings, this is all too familiar. We do this because although we recognise good writing when we see it, too few teachers understand how the 'skill' of writing is actually composed of many thousands of items of propositional knowledge. These items become invisible as they're automatised and so it can be almost impossible for a skilled writer to recognise the components of good writing.

All too often, English teachers expect students to get better at writing by practising writing extended pieces. Obviously this has a place, but it will disproportionately advantage word rich students who already know how to write well. This is bit like expecting people to get better at tennis just by playing tennis or to get better at the piano just by bashing the keys. In many areas of complex skill we know that we have drill the basics. Athletic prowess results from acquiring often minute technical skills; fluent musicianship stems from repeating scales and arpeggios over and over. It makes sense to think that fluent writing is most likely to arise from a similar process, but exactly what this process might look like is something that has not been codified and shared amongst English teachers.
3. What are the most effective methods for improving children's writing?
I'm happy to accept that being able to parse or diagram a sentence bears very little resemblance to the skill of writing. Although it feels intuitively true that mastering the basics of English grammar could only be useful, let's assume I'm wrong. What else then does the research advocate?

The picture is a little bleak. The paper by Wyse and Torgerson which concluded that grammar teaching is ineffective says that, "Although the numbers of robust experimental trials relevant to effective teaching in schools have increased, our analysis of trials in relation to the teaching of writing suggests that there are still too many studies that are not of sufficient methodological quality. In particular, too many studies are weak in relation to allocation of pupils to groups, and the measures for writing remain a challenge."

With this caveat they make the following recommendations:

The most recent meta-analyses of high-quality research studies on writing suggest that, rather than emphasise grammar, the following practices could be selected as a priority for teaching writing in primary/elementary education: (a) an increase in the amount of time that pupils have for writing; (b) adoption of a process approach to writing; (c) creation of a classroom environment that is appropriately supportive of pupils' attempts at learning to write better; (d) development of pupils' writing skills, strategies and knowledge, including ways of planning writing; (e) a use of assessment for learning techniques; (f) a use of computers as part of the process of writing; (g) a use of writing meaningfully across different subject areas (Graham et al., 2016; Wyse, 2017). The robustness of the evidence underpinning these practices is built not on single studies but on multiple RCTs and experimental trials.

Let's briefly consider each suggestion in turn.
(a) an increase in the amount of time that pupils have for writing
As noted, children already spend an awful lot of time writing. If current practices are ineffective, simply doing more of the same is unlikely to result in an improvement. My advice to teachers is to ask students to write less. Specifically, if teachers don't explicitly value the process of writing, then students are likely to learn that how they write is relatively unimportant. I'd rather see children doing shorter more focussed writing exercises such as those advocated in my Slow Writing posts.
(b) adoption of a process approach to writing
The idea here is to focus on the process rather than the product of writing in order to encourage a more metacognitive approach to the act of writing. This is essentially the idea behind Slow Writing and one I'm happy to endorse. However, what children write is as important as how they write and if we entirely neglect the product, that is also likely to have negative consequences. I see the 'process approach' as a form of scaffolding and, like all scaffolding, teachers need to have a plan for removing it to prevent children becoming dependent on it.
(c) creation of a classroom environment that is appropriately supportive of pupils' attempts at learning to write better
I'm not really sure what this means. If it means decorating the physical environment with helpful reminders and motivational quotes, then - as I explain here - it's probably not a good idea. If it means creating an environment where children are encouraged to behave well, work hard and value effort, then it's almost certainly a good idea.
(d) development of pupils' writing skills, strategies and knowledge, including ways of planning writing
It's somewhat tautological to suggest that the best way to improve children's writing is by developing their writing skills. It's obviously right that children need to develop the knowledge to write well, the question is, how? I'd agree that it makes sense to devote some time to effective planning but again, do we know what effective planning actually is? Does it look the same for all types of writing? Should students to taught to use different kinds of graphic organisers? Committing curriculum to planning may be useful, but will also be limiting. Eventually children need to develop effective mental representations of what good writing looks and feels like so this approach must address how students will internalise the idea of planning.
(e) a use of assessment for learning techniques
Again, it depends on what you mean by assessment for learning. I've written extensively on how we get AfL wrong and so it should go without saying that we would need to avoid these pitfalls. In the worst case, teachers can end up justifying the kind of backwards teaching Ashman has written about as an AfL technique. Let's not do that.
(f) a use of computers as part of the process of writing
As a professional writer, I always use a computer to write. As a classroom teacher, I rarely did. If the aim of English teaching is - in part - to support children's performance in national exams, then they won't be helped by spending too much time using computers. Unless they learn to hand write fluently, they will be at an enormous disadvantage. I suspect that underlying this recommendation is the notion that using computers is inherently motivating. This is a mistake. Computers are a useful tool, just as a pencil is. It may be true that some children - especially those with terrible hand writing - will prefer to use a computer, nobody gets better at something by avoiding doing it. Also, there's the additional problem that computers can be an absorbing distraction. If my experience is anything to go by, I spend more time stopping children using Word Art than on improving their writing.
(g) a use of writing meaningfully across different subject areas
This is something that happens as a matter of course in most primary settings and is definitely something that secondary schools ought to be better at. Non-English teachers sometimes feel resentful of the idea that they ought to be developing their students' writing skills, but this is terribly misguided. Writing is different in different curriculum areas. It would be foolish indeed for geography teachers to rely on their English teacher colleagues to teach the kind of writing that works best in geography. It's also worth considering that time spent thinking how best to express ideas about content will not only improve students' ability to write, it could also improve their ability to think about the content they're learning. Who wouldn't want that?

In conclusion, if teachers are doing all of the above exceptionally well then maybe they have a solid argument for not teaching grammar at any point. I'm not and never have argued that grammar teaching should replace any other part of the writing process. My position is a backlash against the fact that for decades, schools in England have systematically avoided teaching grammar and as a result are now ill-equipped to do it well.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What *does* improve children's writing? - David Didau: The Learning Spy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In my last post I discussed evidence that suggests grammar teaching does not lead to an improvement in children's writing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you think of language as a whole, then 'knowledge about language' is made up of anything and everything that describes language or can explain why and how we use it in the ways that we do.
Over the last few years, 'knowledge about language' in the hands of the government, the DfE and Michael Gove has been reduced to 'grammar' and 'grammar' has been reduced to one model, one form of what 'grammar' might be - a so-called 'structure and function' model.
This single model of 'grammar' (treated as if it's the only model) and enforced through the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test, then holds sway over primary education, and primary aged children.
First, to be clear, there are other models of grammar, which, say, treat that word 'function', not as how words 'function' inside sentences (e.g. this noun is the subject of the sentence) but as social functions (e.g. why have so many of us started saying 'So...' at the beginning of our utterances).
For some reason, this form of grammar was not the one implemented and enforced.

Over the last 150 years, a huge amount of work has gone into examining how the many different uses of language work and have created disciplines such as
There is, though, an even more important criticism to make. 'Knowledge about language' is a massive subject and can't be reduced to 'grammar' of any kind. Since the time of Aristotle, linguists have tried to examine language, describe it and explain it. Aristotle was particularly interested in the 'effects' of particular uses of language and did a damned good job of it. We all know, for example, what 'catharsis' is, thanks to him, but he did more than that in his book 'Poetics'.
narratology, stylistics, pragmatics and intertextuality. Though these are mostly written about in very academic ways, they can be broken down into very accessible (and enjoyable) ways for children and school students to use. To be clear: these are also 'knowledge about language', and because they are tied very closely to 'language in specific uses' and not 'abstract ideals', they are especially useful in helping children speak and write.
Narratology, for example, enables us to examine how stories (or any kind of writing) are 'told': e.g. who narrates? how does the narration change? what kind of narrator is narrating? what devices does the narrator use to 'talk' to us?
Narratology can help us look at how the narration enables us to know how characters think. There are several very different devices that have grown up, all the way from 'she thought' to the 'free indirect discourse' favoured by Jane Austen and many writers of children's books.
Narratology can help us look at 'foregrounding' and 'point of view' - how these shift, favouring one or more characters and why?
Narratology is very useful at helping us with time frames which often change via flashback, flash forward and invocations of continuous time or continuous existence.
Stylistics can take us into how texts 'sound' (prosody) - showing us how repetition of structure and letter sounds make rhythms in texts.
Stylistics can draw attention to sentence length, sentence complexity or simplicity, how paragraphs are constructed across texts, why and how these change as the need to express different things change.
Stylistics can draw attention to 'register' - how informal/formal a text is? How much does it draw on modes of text from which sources - does the writing empty speech modes? Are there deliberate attempts to 'borrow' language from specific sources e.g. from a field different from the one in the text, e.g. from science in a novel?
Stylistics can draw attention to which class of words are repeated e.g. many adjectives, many adverbs - or none?
Pragmatics can draw attention to how dialogue is structured and where the narrator dialogues with the audience/readership. Dialogue can be structured in many different ways in fiction and pragmatics can help us make distinctions.
Intertextuality can help us with the matter of 'borrowing' that I mentioned earlier. In essence, all writing is borrowing in that it borrows the sounds, structures and meanings that have gone before in order to do whatever it does. However, some borrowings are more obvious than others and/or more significant. This can be at the level of a whole genre e.g. Hamlet as 'revenge tragedy' or at the level say of using literary motifs or tropes e.g. 'the pathetic fallacy'. Or again allusion to writing or speech that comes before (as Dickens does in the opening pages of 'A Christmas Carol') and so on.
If the government and the DfE had been really interested in a holistic view of language and 'knowledge about language' it would have talked to applied linguists about all this, and then got hold of people who know about pedagogy and asked them to produce materials which applied this 'knowledge about language' in age-appropriate ways, using imitation, and practice and investigation as much as description and direct instruction, so that this 'knowledge about language' could have been applied directly to helping children write well.
But they didn't.
The main reason why they didn't is because the Bew Report of 2011 imposed the SPaG test instead. This was because Michael Gove told them to.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How 'knowledge about language' for schools could be so much better

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you think of language as a whole, then 'knowledge about language' is made up of anything and everything that describes language or can explain why and how we use it in the ways that we do.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I first heard about Slow Writing at a #researched session delivered by David Didau, @learningspy when he talked about asking children to slow down when writing, cut the waffle and focus on every single word or sentence that they construct. I went away and read all he had written about Slow Writing on his blog where he has now helpfully grouped all the slow writing blogs.

I have used Slow Writing successfully over and over again. I have recommended it to many schools who also feedback that it has 'transformed' writing for some children.

New to slow writing?

Just start with 6 - 8 prompts. Allow no choice. This makes it a constrained piece and children have to really think about each and every sentence in the paragraph.

An example may be:

1. Your sentence must start with a verb.
2. Your sentence must contain a simile
3. Your sentence must use a relative clause.
4. Your sentence must be 3 words only.
5. Your sentence must use start with a time phrase.
6. Your sentence must use a modal verb.

Don't just copy and paste this one but think about what you want your pupils to achieve in that single paragraph. With slow writing it is about quality and not quantity. Get the children to work double spaced and then go back and edit these six sentences until 'perfect' (or as close as they can get). Once they are familiar with this concept they can choose the order or you can increase the number of prompts and allow them to choose from the list.

You can see an example of it in action here: Chaperon Rouge Blog

"But this isn't independent!" "Moderators won't like it..". You may say. However, this is not for moderators, it isn't for teacher assessment. This is to allow children to practise their skills, which hopefully they will then use in their independent writing.

Slow writing can be differentiated. You could make a number of lists dependent on ability or once children are familiar with the concept you could give them a choice of options. See diagram below.
Green: Y3 objectives.
Yellow Y4 objectives.
Orange Y5 objectives.
Purple Y6 objectives.

The children in this mixed-age/mixed-ability class were allowed to start where they wanted although the class teacher did guide some pupils as required.

As always I look forward to receiving comments.

​Rob
​

In addition to David's blog there is also an outline of Slow Writing in his book, 'The Secret of Literacy' published by Crown House and available here ​

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I first heard about Slow Writing at a #researched session delivered by David Didau, @learningspy when he talked about asking children to slow down when writing, cut the waffle and focus on every single word or sentence that they construct.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Exam season is nearly upon us and English departments across the land will be gearing up to the Herculean labour of training students to churn out essays which, they hope, will earn them the much coveted A*-C grade in English Language.

The AQA paper gives candidates just a meagre hour to write a short descriptive, explanatory piece and then a longer piece which asks them to persuade and argue.

This isn't much time and most students default position is to race into it, cram in as much verbiage as possible and then down tools to watch the clock tick away the purgatory of the exam hall. This is not a great strategy for producing great writing. So, we teach them to plan (of which there's a fine example from Lisa Janes Ashes here) and to proofread in the hope that maybe, just maybe they'll approach their writing more thoughtfully and produce something that won't make the poor examiner groan in anguished suffering.

But is less perhaps more? Over the past few years I've been experimenting with what, for want of a better idea, I'm calling Slow Writing. The idea is to get students to slow the hell down and approach each word, sentence and paragraph with love and attention. Obviously they'll write less but what they do write will be beautifully wrought and finely honed.

Here's how it works.

Firstly, I tell students that we will be drafting rather than writing. Then I tell them to double space their writing. They find this inordinately difficult so I've taken to providing them with double spaced paper to get them into the habit. I then give them a topic and ask them to complete a set of seemingly random exercises. For example:

1. Your first sentence must starting with a present participle (that's a verb ending in 'ing')
2. Your second sentence must contain only three words.
3. Your third sentence must contain a semi-colon
6. Your fourth sentence must be a rhetorical question
5. Your fifth sentence will start with an adverb
6. Your sixth sentence will contain a simile

The point of it is that they have to slow right down in order to think about their technique. Generally speaking, students find it straightforward to write what they want but it's much harder for them to think about how they're going to write it. This process forces them to concentrate on the how instead of the what.

Once they've finished they get to improve. This is where the double spacing comes into it's own. I ask them to interrogate every single word and consider whether there might be a better word. They look at every sentence and ask, could it begin differently? Should it be longer or shorter? Are they absolutely sure it makes sense? We look at the paragraphs and think about how they link: do they flow logically? Does each paragraph pick up where the preceding one leaves off? Is there variety? (The examiner is particularly keen on one sentence paragraphs.)

Hopefully they will be busily scribbling all over their draft and putting the new ideas in the acres of space made available by double spacing their writing. A neat and tidy exam script is one which has not been perfected, is full of mistakes and will get a lower grade.

Other Slow Writing ideas include:

pop a load of different sentence instructions into a hat and give everyone a random selection

giving students lists of numbers and telling that the number of words in their sentences must conform to these numbers.

paired writing - get students to write alternate sentences and question each other about their choices

use a professionally written text on a different subject and get students to copy the structure and techniques

As always, the proof of the writing is in the reading. Here's an example of an opening paragraph of a film review of Twilight written by one of my Year 11s using Slow Writing:

Ah, Twilight. That time of day when the boundaries between night and day begin to blur. The moment when the sun begins to set and when all those things that go bump in the night stretch, yawn and start feeling that unbearable urge to pee. The very name is a clue to understanding what this film is all about: you see it's not one thing or another. It's not just happy daytime romance and it's definitely not all night-time terror. Just like the name implies it's somewhere in between. So, is this a strength or a weakness? You could take the view that it's this quality that helps the film to appeal to as wide an audience as possible: you get the chic flick crowd as well as the Goths. Or, on the other hand, does it make the whole thing impossibly and disastrously diluted?

Pretty good, huh?

I'm sure none of this is particularly original but it's certainly helped me to help my student see writing as something which can, and should be consciously crafted. If you do anything else which helps, I'd love to add it to my repetoire.

Update

The heroically proportioned David Riley has already started work on an interactive version for his superb suite of teaching tools, Triptico. And it's looking very nice!

Also, here's a lovely post from Lindsay Mason on using board games to improve writing.

Related posts
But is it art?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Slow Writing: how slowing down can improve your writing - David Didau: The Learning Spy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
NB - my latest thinking on Slow Writing can be found here. Exam season is nearly upon us and English departments across the land will be gearing up to the Herculean labour of training students to churn out essays which, they hope, will earn them the much coveted A*-C grade in English Language.