Improving Extended Writing

Guy Goodwin has been working on improving his students' ability to write thoughtful extended writing.  In this piece he comes up with an excellent strategy for developing deep thinking and writing for exam conditions.  It's genius and so simple you'll wonder why you didn't think of it!

Why do students struggle so much with improving essay writing?

One possibility is that too many of the practice ones are in ‘exam conditions’ i.e. against the clock and not knowing the question in advance. Thus students get lots of practice at being unprepared and stressed about time.

Instead it might be helpful to practice writing the best essay possible within your personal word limit and knowing the question before you start. I have been trying this with A2 Philosophy students increasingly over the last couple of years.

1. Find your personal word limit – spend 10 minutes writing fluently anything that you don’t have to think about (e.g. a song lyric or poem that you know by heart). Count how many words you have written. Then multiply up to the time limit you will face in the exam (for example A2 Philosophy questions can be 60 minutes, I allow 50 minutes writing time, so five times the 10 minute total). This is your personal word limit for that subject\exam.

2. Now choose a question that is typical of the exam, but focussed on work recently completed (it need not be an actual past exam question). Write the best essay you can that fits within your word limit, but don’t worry about how long it takes. Use the feedback\marking to make the next one even better.

Over the length of a course students build up a collection of good and improving essays that they can reproduce in exam conditions.

Lazy teacher benefit – you don’t have to deal with a whole class set of essays at once, and you don’t even have to give all students the same number of essay practices.

Guy Goodwin