I’ve recently started tutoring a student who works incredibly hard between her GCSE English lessons. She reads around a particular text or topic without even being told to. She is completely focused on attaining the very highest grades. The trouble is, that when she came to writing an essay (on Macbeth), her thoughts were exceedingly difficult to follow, and I therefore couldn’t award her the highest marks, despite her hard work.
Why were her essays so difficult to follow? Firstly, she tried to include everything she had read in one short essay, which meant she was shoe-horning information in. Secondly, she was writing very quickly, and not planning. Her speed is understandable: students are only too aware that in exam conditions, they have a meagre 1 hour 45 minutes to answer two extract-based questions on two different texts (AQA). A typical student’s response is to churn out an answer crammed with as much terminology as they can and then down tools. The resulting essay often requires the examiner’s patience to pick apart what it is the student is trying to say.
For this reason, I try to teach my students to slow down in order to plan their writing, in the hope that it will encourage them to write more thoughtfully and to produce more coherent essays. If they practise writing slowly enough, the techniques they learn will become automatic and they will be able to speed up in time for the assessment.
If you’d like to read more about the virtues of slow writing and its mechanics, have a look at this article by David Didau, who originated the concept and the term.
If you'd like your teen to learn how to best compare poems and other text
One result of slowing the writing process down and insisting on planning is that students are forced to be more ‘critical’ and ‘conceptualised’. In the context of GCSE English assessment, these terms basically mean that students can construct essays around their own individual viewpoints; they have and can express with conviction strong opinions about the text and the author’s purpose. Producing ‘critical’ and ‘conceptualised’ essays takes confidence and a close knowledge of the text. It is very tempting, as a student, just to regurgitate ideas from revision resources and from their teacher. The trouble is, if you are adopting someone else’s ideas and you don’t fully understand them, there’s a limit to how far you can successfully implement them to explore a text.
In every paragraph, the place where a student’s ability to be critical shines through is in the thesis statement. Usually the first sentence in a paragraph, it is where the writer expresses her stance or opinion towards the question. The rest of the paragraph is spent substantiating the writer’s claim. If a student can be critical in their topic sentence, Assessment Objective 1 is satisfied and the candidate’s grade goes up accordingly.
So, how to form a successful topic sentence? Well, since becoming critical takes time, I encourage my tutees to take a step back and to complete a planning sheet such as this one (courtesy of the learningaddict.co.uk) The top box encourages students to form an overall stance, which will help them to write their introduction. Boxes 2-5 each encourage students to form a thesis statement.
Here below is another way of achieving the same result.
Once the student has written a first draft of their thesis statements, I often encourage them to edit them. One way of doing this is to get them to evaluate my own statements and to change any that aren’t suitably ‘critical’ or ‘conceptualised’. Here’s an example.
Because the student mentioned at the start of this blog post works so hard, she quickly adopted these slow planning and writing techniques and the results were impressive.
If your teen isn’t getting the grades they hope for in their analytical writing, why not book a quick Zoom call with me? I can suggest steps you can take to help your teen to improve their writing. It’ll also allow you to decide whether I would be a good fit as a teen for your tutor.
