Helping With Writing at Home

Maths has a right answer and writing does not, which is why most families do four times as much maths practice and feel guilty about it. The guilt is misplaced but the imbalance is real, and writing is thirty minutes of a test where the other components are multiple choice.

The good news is that writing is the component where a parent with no exam knowledge can help most, because what improves writing is not exam technique. What the paper asks for is set out in the writing test explained; this is about the year before that matters.

Stop correcting first

The instinct is to pick up a pen and fix the spelling, and it is the single most counterproductive thing available. A child whose first feedback is always mechanical learns that writing is a minefield, and the reliable way to cross a minefield is to take very short steps, which produces exactly the short flat sentences the marker is not rewarding.

Spelling and punctuation are worth marks and they are worth fixing. They are worth fixing second, on a separate pass, on a different day.

One question, not a list

After reading a piece, ask one question that only the writer can answer. Not a judgement. A gap you genuinely noticed.

• Why did she go back into the house? I could not tell.
• This ends the moment it gets interesting. What happened next?
• You describe the room for a paragraph. What are we meant to feel about it?
• Who is telling this? I could not decide whether they liked him.

One question does more than twelve corrections because it hands the problem back. Twelve corrections tell a child their work is a mess; one question tells them a reader was paying attention and got stuck somewhere specific.

Where the marks actually move

Across the assessment criteria, the differences between an average piece and a strong one are rarely vocabulary. They are structure and control: whether the piece has a shape, whether the ending is earned, whether the writer has decided what the piece is about.

• A beginning that starts in the middle of something rather than describing the weather.
• One idea, developed, instead of four ideas mentioned.
• An ending that answers the beginning rather than stopping when the time went.
• Sentence variety, which is largely absorbed from reading and not from instruction.

That last one is why the reading habit belongs in a piece about writing. Almost nobody writes better sentences than the ones they have read.

Planning is the part to time

Under exam conditions the difference between a piece that holds together and one that wanders is usually four minutes at the start. A child who spends four of their thirty minutes deciding what happens, and writes it down in six words, produces a better piece than one who begins immediately and discovers the plot at minute twenty.

This is worth practising as its own exercise, separately from writing. Give a prompt, allow four minutes, produce a plan and nothing else, and stop. Ten of those in a term is more useful than ten full pieces, and it costs a fraction of the effort.

How often, and how to keep it survivable

One piece a fortnight, marked properly, beats one a week that nobody has time to read. An unread piece teaches nothing at all, and a child who writes into silence works out very quickly that it does not matter.

If nobody in the house can face reading it closely, that is an argument for fewer pieces rather than lower standards. Writing is the one component where the feedback is the whole of the value.

And if you are wondering whether any of this is worth the fight in the first place, that question is answered separately and honestly in should my child sit the Selective test.