I have read thousands of essays written by high school and undergraduate students. And, I have written a few essays myself. Of those that I have read, I have witnessed the sacred and the profane, the exquisite, and the excruciatingly awful. In some essays, students have taught me things I didn’t know, several have made me laugh aloud (sometimes to my embarrassment whilst travelling on public transport), a quite a few have had me scratching my head in utter befuddlement.

One of the challenges of writing essays is getting started – writing that first, introductory paragraph. This is, I think, a particular problem in examinations (in the context of English Language and Literature, this is often a Paper 2 examination). Since students are understandably nervous, it is not surprising that students can find writing effectively from the first word difficult. Not infrequently, students will spend one or two pages in a ‘warm-up routine’, skirting the question prompt before developing greater focus somewhere on the second page. And, as teachers, we have, I suspect, all read the ‘universally experienced, geographically ubiquitous, dawn of time’ introduction.

As teachers, we need to provide students with strategies to introduce essays effectively. This can’t be left to chance. In the following lesson, students are taught to write in a direct, precise, and succinct fashion. The approach to writing introductions, here, may not suit the tastes of every teacher, but it does have the advantage of teaching writing strategies that get to the point, sooner rather than later.

The lesson is on PowerPoint. You may like PowerPoint and use it in your teaching. Alternatively, you may abhor the sight of PowerPoint, viewing it as an enemy of inquiry-based learning. Whatever your perspective, students, I would argue, do need to be explicitly taught. And PowerPoint can support explicit teaching. There is, to my mind, no problem with teacher talk per se. What matters, from the perspective of teaching and learning, is the quality of teacher talk. The following lesson idea requires teachers to lead learning and to talk. As a basic framework, it assumes an approach involving explaining, modelling, scaffolding, and independent practicing.