How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

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How to teach essay writing

Sometimes, secondary schools assume that students will arrive in Year 7 with the ability to write a complete essay. Sadly this isn’t the case, and it isn’t the fault of primary teachers; it is just the way the education system works. From a writing perspective, primary schooling focuses on fluency and a set number of styles. The secondary curriculum does all that and adds essay writing into the mix.

Essay writing is problematic because we make a lot of assumptions about who has taught students this skill. I don’t think I was ever explicitly taught how to write an essay; instead, I learned through trial and error and, if I am honest, more the latter than the former. How many secondary curriculums feature the explicit teaching of essay writing? Not that many, I’d wager. In fact, I’d place a fairly substantial bet that very few have a unit or even a series of lessons dedicated to it because of the amount of content that needs to be covered.

The essay is simplified or refined thought. It is the sieve of learning in the classroom. It shows how a student has interpreted or used the knowledge taught and how they have formed new ideas along the way. A good essay is a thing of beauty. A bad one is painful (to read and to write) and time consuming. An essay shows how we think. It shows the level of our thinking. That’s why essay writing needs to have a stronger place in the curriculum, even in primary schools. The drawback is that, compared to other forms — story writing, newspaper writing — essay writing isn’t very sexy.

Essays are the staple of writing in secondary schools and we are fools if we do not acknowledge this. They show the synthesis of ideas. They show condensed thinking. They show a hypothesis. A test shows a student’s knowledge and understanding, yet an essay shows how they think. What we get, however, are piecemeal essays. Look at any exam paper and you see the components of an essay. The questions call for an essay dissected into constituent parts. The twelve-mark question is simply a paragraph. We have dissected the essay so much in some subjects that all that’s left is body parts in a jar. We are assessing students on their ability to play ’Chopsticks’ when they could be aspiring to Mozart.

The latest GCSE English literature exam has students writing the equivalent of three essays in two hours and fifteen minutes. These are long, extended pieces of discourse. The preparation that teachers have taken students through has not always been as helpful as it might be. Essays can be taught as dot-to-dot writing. Repeat everything the teacher has told you, and here are some silly structural devices to include. In that case, you end up with the student as a metaphorical photocopier of ideas. Their success is dependent on copying the teacher’s fixed model and their mark dependent on how close they are. That’s why essay plans are so dangerous. They promote a fixed model of writing.

An essay teaches us a lot about a student. It teaches us about their understanding of plot, character, language, themes and structure. It teaches us about their ability to concentrate at length on an idea. It teaches us about how much they have listened. It teaches us about how well or how poorly they have followed instructions.

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It is pretty hard for students to see what it is that needs to be developed when trying to improve their essay skills. They are raised to write and tell stories from an early age, but knowing what a good essay should or shouldn’t look like is something they haven’t encountered. We have stories in our blood, yet essays are alien. Students are in the eye of the storm when writing; it is always hard to see the impact when you are at the centre.

This approach is a nice and easy one that helps students to see what they have got to do. I start by getting them to draft their essays. Then I show them this:

Description 90%

Explanation 10%

Linking 0%

Opinion 0%

Typically, this is how students write a first draft. The emphasis is on cramming everything in, so they list or describe things. It is usually drivel. I then show students the next step up:

Description 35%

Explanation 35%

Linking 15%

Opinion 15%

I simply ask students: what is the difference between the two? They start to see how the other aspects are important and relate it to their own work. I get them to assign the figures to their own work. If necessary, they can highlight the different aspects — students love to highlight things.

Finally, I show them this:

Description 10%

Explanation 50%

Linking 20%

Opinion 20%

The great thing about this is that it helps students to quickly understand the purpose of their writing. Progress becomes about reducing the descriptive and increasing the explanatory (the more able students focus on links and opinions). The relationship between the numbers is important. Writing isn’t about chucking everything in the pot and hoping it works. There is an ingredients list, and it does matter how much of each thing you put in a recipe. We have all mixed up a tablespoon and teaspoon. Have a go yourself with this sample paragraph. What percentages do you think the student is using?

Dickens presents Scrooge as a character that starts off mean but becomes warm and softens as the events in the story happen. We see him at the start being cruel and direct to characters, but after each ghost we see him becoming kinder and friendlier in the story. In the opening, we see that even the ’dogs’ of the blind men are scared of him. Dickens uses ’flint’ to highlight how cruel and sharp the character is. At the end we see him openly embracing and being kind to people. Scrooge becomes a kinder and friendlier person as a result of the ghost.¹

Hopefully, you’ll see that the student is focused on describing things, but there is very little explanation here. It is as if the student needs to be constantly asked why as they are writing. All too often, writing is about content rather than purpose. This approach addresses that. Most teachers are familiar with the PEE model and its various chimera-like children. Students are taught to make a point (P) and then provide evidence (E) for that point. Finally, they finish their paragraph with some explanation (the final E). The PEE form of analytical essay has its roots in content rather than skills. Students are taught parrot-like, and quite dully, to use this structure. They are not thinking about the skills they are showing, but fitting into an image of what an essay must look like. By placing the emphasis on skills rather than content, however, you change how students write an essay. Helping them to see that they are describing more than they are explaining is more helpful than just telling a student that they need more explanation in their essay and that they have only done a PE paragraph and not a PEE paragraph. After looking at the percentages with students, I will then spend time looking at explanation and at how they can use words, sentences and phrases to help them explain things better.

This approach can work for other things too. Recently, when analysing and writing speeches, I applied the percentages to the use of ethos, pathos and logos. Students were able to explore how various writers played around with the balance for effect. At the same time, we explored how the context might change the percentages and this caused quite a bit of discussion. What’s more important when announcing a war, pathos or ethos?

We might offer this as a starting point and then see if there is a need to change the ratio between the elements based on context:

30% ethos

20% pathos

50% logos

For a funeral speech, a student might need to increase the pathos. For a head teacher’s speech, a student might want to increase the ethos. For a politician’s, a student might want to reduce logos completely. The relationship between the three elements is key and leads to a very useful analysis of speech.