As teachers we spend ages marking students’ writing. Yet we often find ourselves wondering: ‘Is this effective?’ ‘Am I helping my students in the best way possible?’

In this practical workshop, we are going to look at four samples of real student texts. In each case you will be asked to comment on what you think of the student’s efforts and what feedback you would give. We are then going to look at some feedback for each of them and discuss how we can improve it.

At the end we are going to distil four key principles that should guide us whenever we in turn have to guide students towards becoming more effective writers.