Back in August, I wrote about a successful piece of student work in the Love to Write course, based on the student’s imaginative flair. Today, I’ll present a piece of work that shows how we encourage structured writing in these classes.

Amy, a P3 student, attended one of my lessons in which the class was tasked with writing about their own invention. They were told to imagine that they were entering an invention competition, and had to write an email to the competition organisers to explain their invention, justify why it was the best, and say why other competing inventions were useless. Writing to provide clear explanation is a skill that differs from fiction, so I was interested to see how the class would cope.

Amy submitted this great piece of work, which shows that she was able to use her imagination while also writing with clear structure and focus of her points. Being able to structure one’s imagination appropriately is a key skill that will lead onto students succeeding in exams, especially in more sophisticated creative writing and essay writing tasks later in their education. Amy also referred to the vocabulary list that we have been building up in this course to use them – I was particularly impressed with the word ‘ingenious!’

I encourage all students to read widely across a variety of genres (fiction, non-fiction, magazine articles etc.) in order to get a feel for how they are different, and to try and work their styles into their own writing. Well done, Amy, for producing a great piece of writing to show how this is done!