One Paragraph a Day

It is nine o’clock on a Sunday evening. A Year 10 student opens a laptop and remembers that a week of writing is due tomorrow. There are five paragraphs to write. None of them has been started. By midnight all five are done. The word count is right, the work is handed in, and the student goes to bed relieved.

Across town, another student wrote one paragraph each evening that week, about fifteen minutes at a time, and on Sunday night wrote nothing at all. By the end of the week, both students had written the same number of words.

Which of them would you expect to improve more? Most people would choose the second student. Ask them why, and the usual answer is that the second student worked harder. They did not. They did exactly the same amount of work. The difference lies in what happened between the paragraphs.

A paragraph a day is not a lot

In the weeks when our students are writing, we ask for about 1,000 words a week. We build up to that number in steps of about 200 words, so nobody starts there. Even so, a thousand words sounds like a great deal to a fifteen-year-old. It sounds like an essay every weekend, on top of school and homework.

Spread across the week, though, it is roughly one detailed paragraph and a bit each day, and in the first weeks it is only a few sentences. In our view, that is not a lot. It just takes consistency.

A paragraph is also the right size for learning. Small enough to fit into a school night, it is still big enough to hold a whole idea: a point, the evidence for it, what the writer is doing and why it matters. That is the shape the examiner marks in a GCSE English answer, one paragraph at a time. It is small enough to check, too. Valerie Shute, who reviewed the research on feedback that helps people learn, advised that feedback should come “in small enough pieces so that it is not overwhelming and discarded”.^[1] The feedback on one paragraph takes a minute to read. Feedback on a whole essay arrives as a long list, and long lists tend to be skimmed.

What goes wrong on a Sunday night

So why does the Sunday-night student learn less? The psychologist Ronald Kellogg, who studies how writing skill develops, warned against writing in “marathon sessions or binges of massed practice that can exhaust and frustrate the writer”. Professional writers, he noted, “compose for just a few hours per day at most, but on a highly consistent daily schedule”.^[2] His work was about university students rather than teenagers, so we take only the general point from it: a steady schedule matters more than the length of any one session.

Our students have a two-hour writing session every week. It is planned, it is part of every week, and in our view it builds the stamina a student needs for a GCSE English exam, which lasts close to two hours. The Sunday-night session is different. Nobody planned it, and its only purpose is to make up for a week of writing nothing.

The bigger cost is the feedback. A student who writes a paragraph on Monday can use Monday’s feedback on Tuesday. A student who writes five paragraphs on Sunday makes the same mistake five times before anyone can point it out.

Survey data from the UK points the same way. The National Literacy Trust asked pupils how often they wrote outside school. Pupils who wrote every day were about five times as likely to be writing above the expected level for their age as pupils who never wrote outside school: 30.9% against 5.8%.^[3] Those pupils were aged eight to eleven, much of their writing was for fun, and the survey shows a link rather than a cause. Even so, writing often went with writing well.

The trap of writing more

If writing often helps, the obvious next step is to write even more. However, one of the best-known studies of writing habits shows what can happen when the words are forced out.

In a study published in 1983, the psychologist Robert Boice worked with 27 university teachers who were struggling to write. Some were told to write only when they felt like it. Some wrote on a regular schedule. A third group wrote on a schedule with a penalty for every session they missed: a cheque sent to an organisation they disliked. The regular writers produced about three times as many pages as those who waited to feel like it, and the penalty group produced about eight times as many. However, when the researchers counted the new ideas on each page, the penalty group’s pages held only about half as many.^[4] The study was small and has never been repeated, so we take only the general point from it. Forcing out more words did not produce more thinking.

A much larger review reached a similar conclusion. In 2007 Steve Graham and Dolores Perin reviewed the research on how to improve the writing of older students, for a report called Writing Next. They found that the evidence for simply writing more was mixed, and they concluded that “providing more opportunities to write without effective instruction and motivation is not enough to improve writing quality”.^[5]

What did work? The methods with the largest effects were teaching students how to plan and revise their writing, and setting them a specific goal for each piece.^[5] In those studies, the students who improved most were not the ones who wrote the most. They were the ones who knew what each piece was trying to do, and who checked whether it had done it.

This is one of the core pillars of our programme. Our students do not write a piece once and hand it in. They plan it, outline it, polish it and redraft it, and each redraft works towards a specific target from the marking of the last one.

John Hattie and Helen Timperley, in a well-known review of feedback, described three questions that useful feedback answers: “Where am I going? … How am I going? … Where to next?”^[6] They also noticed a trap. Students often learn that the answer to “Where to next?” is simply “more”: more work, more pages, more of the same.^[6] A paragraph a day can fall into that trap. Written without a target and never checked, it is just more words.

The research on what is called deliberate practice describes the difference. Practice improves a skill when it targets one weakness at a time and is checked against a clear standard, as we explain in Just Tell Me How?. It is not magic: in Learning Is Change we explain that in education it accounts for only part of the difference between students. But it does describe the difference between writing a paragraph and practising one.

Turning a paragraph into practice

So what turns one paragraph into practice? It needs one target, and it needs to be checked against that target.

Go back to the student who wrote one paragraph each evening. Suppose their last marked essay said, “Explain what the writer is doing, not only what happens.” All week, every paragraph was written to fix that one thing. Each evening, before closing the laptop, the student read the paragraph back against that comment and the mark scheme, and the next evening’s paragraph used what they had found. By Friday, they knew where they were gaining marks and where they were losing them.

That is the goal we give our students. The paragraph is the practice, the marking shows where the marks are won and lost, and the next paragraph is where the student uses what the marking showed them. We believe that this, repeated through the year, is what leads to a grade 9. The research does not give a daily number of words. What it does show is that small pieces of writing, written often, with a clear target and feedback, are the conditions in which writing improves.

The Sunday-night student wrote just as many words. But by the time any feedback arrived, all five paragraphs had already been written.

For parents

You do not need to read or judge your child’s paragraph. You can help with the habit. Ask your child what their target is this week and which paragraph they wrote today for it. If they missed a day, help them find fifteen minutes tomorrow rather than doubling up at the weekend. If a target or a mark puzzles you, ask us why, and we will explain it.

Five things to do this week

1. Choose one target. Look at your last piece of marked work and pick one comment to work on all week.

2. Write one paragraph a day. About fifteen minutes on a school night is enough.

3. Check it against your target. Before you stop, read the paragraph again and ask: did I do the one thing I was trying to do?

4. Use today’s feedback tomorrow. When feedback arrives, change your next paragraph because of it.

5. Do not leave it all for Sunday night. If you miss a day, write tomorrow’s paragraph tomorrow. Five paragraphs in one evening repeat the same mistake five times.

If you would like to know where your writing stands today, our free assessmenttakes five minutes.

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