Cohesion in writing: Won’t anybody think about paragraph two?

 We, generally, spend an inordinate amount of time writing openings to texts. We are happy to analyse openings to texts. We are happy to get students to practice opening paragraphs. We are happy for students to experiment with how to start a speech. And, over the years, I’d say rarely is the problem in writing localised to the opening. I’d be bold to say that most students get it. They get that the opening should be interesting and engaging. Rarely do I read the opening to a story and go, ‘yawn’. Rarely do I read the opening to a piece of non-fiction writing and shout, ‘BORING!’. They get it. 

Most of the time, I read their texts and I am engaged. The problem comes after the opening. Yes, some openings are better than others and show confidence, tone and subtlety, but, for the most, they do the job. Signal intent. Tease the reader with something interesting. And, be a bit more interesting than a Geography essay. It is the paragraph after the introduction where the rot comes in. My reading flow crashes into the wall. The development of writing is a major problem for all teachers of writing. How do you get students to develop their writing? 

The relationship between the introduction and the next paragraph is really important, yet it is largely undervalued and underdeveloped. We are so happy that writing is happening that we forget the value of development. The planning stage is supposed to do a lot of lifting in writing. It is the point where students are supposed to structure the writing yet structuring writing happens during the writing. Mini decisions are made, when writing, that connect ideas and parts of the discourse all the time. I think we need to be more explicit about the micro decisions we make in writing. How can I connect this idea with what I said before? 

I have sung on numerous occasions about the beauty of a sonnet. It is the closest we get to the beauty of Mathematics. How the components link and connect is so important with a sonnet. That form, because it is so tight and small, forces cohesion. Rhyme scheme. Structure. Volta. Sestet. Octave. All work together to link and connect the whole piece. Fiction has a lot of things that build cohesion across paragraphs. A mystery. The sequence of events. Mood. Logic. That’s why the jar between the first paragraph and the second isn’t so bad with fiction writing. Students know that if I am writing about a character waking up in paragraph one then in paragraph two the logical thing will be to dress or feed the character. There’s a natural cohesion to story writing. Where the better students succeed is by building cohesion through subtle choices? 

Ideas for how students can build subtle cohesion across paragraphs in creative writing 

# Use of phrasing. Dickens excels at this. Having three or so words used in a variety of combinations to seed a cohesion across a text. The danger here is to use adjectives. A nice one to use is verbs. Associate a verb with a character and think about how you can use the verb again in a different context and combination. 

# A motif. Get students to think of a strong image and idea combination and look at how they can reiterate that in different ways. I use a crack as a powerful one. Students draw attention to visual cracks in their writing and they foreshadow the ending which explores a breakdown in a relationship. 

# Foreshadowing is one concept that students easily grasp when analysing a text but it is the one thing they don’t deal well with when writing stories. They are happy to write an introduction along the lines of ‘Today was the day my life was going to change’, but then that one piece of foreshadowing is then dropped for the rest of the writing until we get to the end, probably. I like verbal foreshadowing like that, but students need to plan for it. They need to structure their writing around the foreshadowing and not have it as a throwaway line. Think of how a student could build around these sentences. 

[1] I knew this day would come, but I didn't know it would be so terrible and life-changing. 

[2] Something small happened just then, but I wouldn’t know its significance until the tragedy. 

[3] I made a choice then which would change things forever. 

[4] She knew then what would happen, but why didn’t she do anything to stop it? 

# Light is such a natural cohesive device in writing. The movement of time is a default cohesive device for students. They love telling you how time has passed. Three minutes later. The next week. Light does it so much better. It shows the passing of time subtly and connects the writing together. The darkness in one paragraph links to the sun rising in the next. 

There’s just a few cohesive devices for creative writing. Nonfiction writing is a little more complex and I think we need to work with students on developing cohesion in their transactional writing. All too often, their writing consists of listing ideas rather than developing one idea. That’s because non-fiction, unless we use narrative elements, doesn’t have those natural cohesive elements. Instead, we have to work harder on building cohesive elements. The planned structure for this is so important. I tell students to focus on one really good idea. Then, work hard to convince me why that idea is so good. Their structure is based around the idea and doing something with the idea. The introduction is the stating of their viewpoint and their main idea, then we work around how to develop that idea. How can they develop their point? It’s a really hard thing to change in the minds of students. They automatically list rather than develop. For that reason, we look at a number of structural choices about what you can do with an idea. 

·       Pick an aspect of the idea and investigate it – Parents track our bedtime, our meals, our free time.

·       Give a hypothetical situation or scenario – Imagine parents being tracked.

·       Explore the end consequences of the issue - There will be no surprises. No surprise visits. No surprise presents. Everything becomes predictable.

·       Draw attention to the flaws or weaknesses – Phones are easily lost, forgotten or stolen.

·       Share the emotional impact – Freedom is precious, but parents are looking to rip that away from young people.

·       Share a history of the issue – Parents since the dawn of time have always wanted to know where their child is and what they are up to.

·       Define or give a clarification of something people might not know – Tracking means watching and following the movement of a person. 

Students then look at shaping an argument. For example, they could go ‘introduction - define - flaw - hypothetical’. The cohesive device is the idea and the argument is shaped around the idea. It is quite transformative when students get this understanding. There’s a shift in writing. Then, the practice writing becomes about developing and doing something with the idea rather than listening and repeating ideas.

For me, this term, I have been working on Q5 and getting students to work on that relationship between paragraph one and paragraph two. Instead of asking them to write an introduction, I have been practising how they move from paragraph one to paragraph two. I have been using the following as a quick starter. 

At the start, students just carried on the writing and tended to repeat the previous point. By about attempt number three, and after feedback from me, they started to get it. Practising the process really helped and I can see the impact in their latest assessments. Those micro decisions in writing have been identified and students are making decisions in their writing about how things connect and link. Thinking about what to do with an idea is much better than thinking of what next idea to include. Students are hung up on the amount of ideas when really they should be focusing on their best idea and developing that. 

So, if we are serious about developing writing, we need to be forgetting about introductions and looking at paragraph two. Paragraph two is where we see the skill and the level of writing. Writing will improve if we shift our focus a bit, because paragraph two shows us what a student can do in terms of structure and cohesion. Introductions are flashy, buy paragraph twos are clever. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

Semi Skimmed Reading - Reading and approaching unseen texts

For years, skim reading has been a thing. I have seen it used and referred to time and time again. Yet, I think it is the single most damaging skill in English. Ok, I will dial down the drama. Right, it is a dangerous thing when looking at how students read in lessons. Skim reading is quick, superficial and answer focused, but isn’t insightful, perceptive and clever. The problem we have is that in schools the default reading strategy is skim reading. It is the go to. The first step. The emergency button when reading exam papers.

The English exams are all unseen text exams. Even the literature exams are unseen texts. You don’t know what you are going to be reading about regardless if you have read the text. There’s a whole surprise element about things. Gotcha. You didn’t think it would be that?  Because everything is unseen, the way students read the text is so important and here is the problem. English places more emphasis on the text / sources than the questions. Yet, most subjects have a greater emphasis on the question than sources. That’s why students read the question and look for the answer. The default across exams is this process. Look at the question and then look at the source. This is where skimming and scanning comes in. Look at the question and then hunt for the answer. This is where English is far more nuanced and complex. 

English is like painting a picture rather than fox hunting. Yes, you can set the hounds off to look for an answer, but during that process they will have missed lots of interesting and relevant things because they only focused on the scent of one thing. The scent usually is what they are expecting to happen. A painting is a culmination of aspects combined to make the whole. The whole is always more important than the single parts.  

Time and time again I see students fall into this process. Read the question and then search for the answer. If we look across whole cohorts, we see this permeates across all aspects of English. It’s largely why students rarely plan. The fox hunt approach. Quick and fast before you lose the scent. That’s why students waffle with literature responses. They found a scent of something so they need to write it down before they lose it. That’s why students waffle in transactional writing. I better get the scent of an idea down before it fades. Again and again, they do this. 

Texts should be the driving force for understanding and not the question. The questions are only there to see that they really, really understand the text. It is not to show that they really, really understand the question. We’ve got to the point where the question has such a damaging impact on understanding. Students automatically focus on the question because of the school’s collective emphasis on the question first then checking the source for the answer, but we are supporting it even more by putting all the emphasis on the questions and supporting this fox hunting approach to reading. If a student knows the text well, then there isn't that much of a need to spend time looking at how to write the question. Largely, the teaching related to answering the question is making sure their writing emulates a person understanding the text. Teaching exam preparation is largely teaching students visual markers for an examiner to think ‘cor this student knows their stuff’. 

Hiding the questions is key to addressing the problem. Students must ensure they understand the text first, before they even think of the questions. Take GCSE English Language Paper 1. We always look at the text in isolation. No questions. No skimming and scanning. The starting point is reading the text. It isn’t searching for techniques. It isn’t finding every clever thing we can. It isn’t even anything fancy. Read it and make sure we understand it.  

I follow this structure for approaching all texts on the language paper. But, here, I am going to specify Paper 1. 

Step 1 - The letter box - The overview 

Orientating the text is a tricky aspect. It is key for getting the overall text’s meaning. The sooner students understand the context of the story the better. We’ve all read novels where it has taken us three pages to work out an elf’s perspective we are seeing things from  and not the tree’s perspective. Oh, and everyone is dead.

#Who is the protagonist? Who is going on an emotional / physical / spiritual journey? 

#What is the conflict? What is going to cause the drama in the extract? 

#What is the genre of the story? What are the rules and things I’d expect to see with this genre? 

Students look for these markers to build a rough picture of the story. Rosabel. She is poor. Realism. Then, there might be some inferences we can make based on the overview. It always helps to get them to think before they read the extract.   

Step 2 - Read and summarise 

Then, simply I get students to read the text one paragraph at a time. For each paragraph, they come up with a title. This then helps solidify the focus. 

Interestingly, it takes some time to get students to be good at this, because they try to overcomplicate things. They want to sound good from the start. Giving them confidence to say that the section is about the bus is key. This is still orientating around the story. 

Usually, at this stage, students in the past have highlighted forty techniques. The sad thing is that students only really need about four or five good ones. But, like skim reading, how students engage with reading has become warped. We need students to focus on understanding first and that’s what isn’t always happening. 

Step 3 - Track the journey 

Finally, we spend time pulling it all together. I get students to simply draw a table. An eye. A heart. A lightbulb. Then, we track the start / middle / end. 

What does the writer focus on in the start / middle / end? 

What are we supposed to feel at the start / middle / end? 

What ideas are being explored in the text? 

Feelings can be quite a tricky thing to articulate, so often we start with positive / negative and then attach specific emotion after that. Students find it much easier to go negative and then anxious rather than trying to find a word that matches the effect. 

Once students have spotted the focus and the emotions they can then start thinking about what is really going on in the extract. What are the big ideas? We tend to watch numerous short animated films to get them into the habit of exploring these three things. Focus. Feelings. Ideas. Time spent thinking about them now saves time later. 

Now, we get to the questions. They’ve spent about ten minutes on the extract. But, by then, they understand the subtext and explore what the writing is trying to show and the ideas in the text. Ready to think about the question. When we get to this stage, students have a concrete set of ideas to work with, so when they look at Q2 and talk about techniques they can link to ideas and feelings already thought of. They don’t have to hunt foxes. They are starting from a position of confidence. I have something to work with and I can build on it. 

Exams are pretty stressful and students want to do well, but sometimes the approaches they use, and we teach, are counterproductive and far damaging. Skim reading and focusing on the question first are two things I think we need to address in lessons and help students to avoid. These two elements warp the processes in exams to the point that they are damaging. A focus on skim reading teaches students that there are quick and easy answers to find. A focus on the question teaches students that the reading of the source isn’t important. A student will do well if they read the unseen extracts slowly and in a structured way. 

We need to work harder to show students that English deals with things differently than other subjects.The default might be to skim read and look at the question first in other subjects, but that is the worst thing to do for us.

Thanks for reading, 

Xris