The basic premise of micro writing is focused on that age old problem for teachers: a student’s ability to transfer subject knowledge from articulated utterances and thoughts into high quality extended writing against a specific criteria. The problem with this transference is it doesn’t always happen very well. Knowledge and/or opinions about a subject do not always translate into being able to write well about a topic in the exact form required by the task or assessment in hand. This problem is amplified when it comes to extended writing. Within one or two paragraphs, sometimes sentences, we could say ‘stop writing because I have no need to read two pages of this writing to tell you what you are doing wrong’. Just like with whole class marking, I’ve no need to give detailed feedback repeated ad nauseam on the whole essay. In fact, much of the time I don’t need an extended piece of writing unless it is a full dress rehearsal of the real thing. The moment you buy into that idea is the moment you can reduce your workload and increase the precision of the feedback.
As an example, let us look at a typical form, an essay in response to a posed question. For an essay, you would often drill the various components of the essay in micro writing sections which you would then spread out over a number of lessons broken down as follows:
A very brief plan for the essay (a handful of bullets at most)
Opening two paragraphs
Thematic or topic sections consisting of 2-3 paragraphs in 100-300 word blocks
Concluding paragraphs
Having broken the essay down into the four different types of writing, you can now drill these in micro writing.
At each stage of micro writing, you would use both types of modelling – modelling of process using live writing and articulation of the decision making that you are taking; and modelling of finished products with colour-coded section highlights.
Writing out essay plans – frequently they would be given a question out of the blue at some point in the lesson (Do Now, transition time, plenary) and then have to frame how they would have approached that question, the decisions they would make and outline a brief plan. We would then examine the decision making process of this and review the resultant plan. It’s very easy to mark these and comparative marking would do the job here as well. Visualisers can also be very helpful here. I think a good visualiser is worth its weight in gold for bringing a writer’s lens to written work and enabling everyone to have an insight into the decision making processes of a writer at work.
The opening two paragraphs – these are tricky things to write and both frame and foreshadow the rest of the writing. It’s a frequent writer’s block, this point of an essay, so drilling works well. It’s easy to read their opening paragraph and comment on in seconds. It’s not whether they do it effectively once that’s important. It’s whether they can do this effectively every time. Get them to reflect on their confidence to do this.
Two to three paragraphs on a topic or theme – these paragraphs need to cite evidence and synthesise it into the body of the writing. Here there will be a need for them to recall knowledge and to integrate it well. Once again, they need to be able to do this effectively always rather than just as a once off. In an essay, they will usually need to write a thematic chunk of writing two or three times in an extended piece. So there is no need to write three thematic chunks of the essay straight off. Get the art down first then scale this up. They need to be able to produce their 1-300 word chunk of writing at quality whatever the topic.
Lastly the conclusions. Again, they struggle with the writing of these and lose a lot of marks. Give them lots of practice of this. Write a conclusion to an essay you might have written to one of the practice questions, Write a conclusion to your peer’s essay. Write a new conclusion to one of your old essays. One paragraph conclusions are easy to mark. As always, they need to be good at concluding, not just be able to write one good conclusion.
At the end of this, you bring the pieces together in the full essay in timed conditions. Again, you would be using modelling and close textual analysis to enable the students to see how the different sections operated together – particularly with signposting and foreshadowing.
Students trained with micro writing will be able to immediately tell you which sections of the essay they did well and which they need to improve and direct you to the section they felt most troublesome and where they need the most feedback, making your formative feedback focused and high impact.
This approach works for any writing where they are taking knowledge and/or opinions and have to articulate that knowledge within composition. It’s also less labour intensive than making them write lots of poor copy. You want to intervene quite early on before they’ve written too much at the lower standard. This saves them time and it saves you time.
If you like the premise of micro writing then try it out on an individual level with other forms of extended writing. Collect in tiny pieces of micro writing from each of them to quickly mark formatively or use them as a resource in your teaching – visualisers, comparative marking, peer work, etc. It makes extended writing much more manageable for both students and teachers.
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