Developing academic writing – Caroline Spalding

I’ve been looking for ways to support my Year 8 class with developing a more academic style when they are writing about a text.

I wanted to try and take what I’d read about academic writing and make it into a quick guide that they could easily use in class – and that highlighted some bad habits they had slipped into like using really general terms like ‘lots of’ and ‘stuff’. You can download the sheet I made here:

So far I’ve tried it out with Year 9 and Year 8 with some pleasing results. My next steps are to trial the use of colons to help pupils make more precise and developed points. I also want to try to teach nominalisation (turning verbs into nouns) to see if it helps pupils build more detailed noun phrases about what they have read.