Teaching Writing: Assign a Paragraph, Not an Essay
Teaching writing creates a tricky conundrum for English teachers. Our students need practice, lots of it, in order to improve, but assigning the amount of writing they probably need creates an unsustainable grading situation for us. While there is certainly value in having students write just for the sake of writing, feedback is an important part of teaching writing, and let’s just be real here, if your students are anything like ours, there is only so much ungraded writing (well, work in general, really) they’re willing to do before they stop putting in any sort of meaningful effort.
One approach to address this dilemma is using rubrics, which definitely makes grading more manageable. However, students tend to take personalized feedback more seriously (who wouldn’t?), and, as we all know too well, it can still be time-consuming to grade piles of essays even with the help of a rubric.
Another option, one we have found to be more manageable, is to prioritize assigning regular analytical paragraphs. Of course, this is not in place of writing any essays, but it provides opportunities for focused instruction and feedback on a more regular and manageable basis, and it feels less overwhelming to both students and teachers alike. Shifting how we were teaching writing to prioritize our focus on the paragraph rather than the essay was a gradual one for us, largely because we felt guilty not always assigning full essays for activities we had always assigned essays with, but the more we saw the benefits of focusing on the paragraph, both for us and our students, and the more we saw how we could apply our work with the paragraph to our work with essay structures, the more willing we were to shift our focus.
By the time most students reach high school, they have received writing instruction in a basic 5-paragraph essay format, brainstorming, transition words, and thesis statements. By no means does this mean they are good at these things, but they are familiar with them and most can demonstrate a general understanding of how to structure an essay. In the years we focused teaching writing on these same basics, we saw little improvement in student writing. Simply doing more of the same they had always done wasn’t producing noticeable results. We also know, as most teachers do, that it’s really challenging to teach students to improve the quality of their writing (which is probably, if we’re being honest, part of the reason our approach to teaching writing tended to focus on the basics). We saw the most improvement in our students’ writing when we started zeroing in on what they were saying in individual paragraphs rather than focusing on providing generalized feedback on the essay as a whole.
Our Approach to Teaching Writing
We decided to focus our approach to teaching writing using what we called the 5C paragraph: five sentences referred to as claim, concrete evidence, context, commentary, and connection. We used this structure throughout the year, whether students were writing short-answer responses, paragraphs (sometimes with multiple sets of concrete evidence, context, and commentary), or full essays. At the beginning of the year, our focus was largely on the first two Cs: making sure students clearly and specifically answered the question in the prompt, supported all parts of the claim, and provided appropriate evidence that was integrated, punctuated, and cited correctly. By narrowing our focus, it was easier to provide targeted feedback (which, because it is highly structured, could often come from a comment bank we generated after the first assignment or two) and full-class instruction on specific ways students could improve the quality of their claims and evidence.
As our students began to demonstrate proficiency in these two elements, we switched our attention to the context and commentary sentences, the way we found it most helpful for our students to break down the “commentary” or “analysis” common in most paragraph models. We initially called the context sentence a paraphrase sentence, but for most texts, a paraphrase isn’t particularly necessary or helpful, so it ends up being too repetitive. What we did find helpful was an explanation of what was happening in the text around the quotation, so we began encouraging students to explain what event or circumstances the quotation referred to or what had happened just before or after it. The quality of student arguments improved, and they were able to use the commentary sentence to explain exactly how the words of the selected quotation supported their claim. As students received individual feedback on the quality of these two sentences, they began to ask better questions during the writing process, and their mastery of this important skill improved. By focusing on only one paragraph, it was a lot easier for us and them to see when they had gone off-topic or failed to support a key point; we rarely have the time to do this when looking at full essays, and practice exercises about removing irrelevant sentences are often so straightforward that students don’t transfer their understanding to their own writing.
Finally, we moved from having students write concluding sentences to writing connection sentences. This approach makes it easier for students to transfer their understanding to a longer essay, where they need to transition between body paragraphs instead of writing concluding sentences, but equally, in a shorter response, there is no need for the traditional (and dull) “in conclusion” sentence that restates what the student literally just wrote. Instead, we encouraged students to make connections to the larger text, issue, or world: why do the ideas presented in their paragraph matter? As students improved on these sentences, their responses became a lot more interesting!
So give yourself a break this semester. Stop feeling pressure to drown yourself in piles of essays (or feeling guilty for not assigning them every week). Have students write a structured paragraph once in a while instead of writing a full essay and give them detailed feedback on that smaller writing sample. Hopefully this will open the door for deeper learning and further progress with your growing writers as well!
How do you balance the need for feedback and writing practice with the burden of grading that it creates in your approach to teaching writing? We know there are other strategies out there besides what worked for us! Reach out at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to continue the conversation!