Empower Your Students to Write Well at University

It is that time of year again. The assignments are in and it can be put off no longer: they must be marked and the feedback delivered. So you dig into the pile and very quickly realise that while the work represents earnest effort, much of it is descriptive – accounts of lecture content and reading with a few quotes here and there. If you’ve been teaching on undergraduate and taught post-graduate programmes as long as I did, this will be a familiar story.

The issue is well understood. Because exam requirements often determine how writing is taught in schools, as Ofsted note in their latest English Education Subject Report (Telling the Story, March 2024), students are well prepared for exams, but often less familiar with the kind of writing they need to do at university. This can drive down results, erode student satisfaction, and contribute to poor retention. What to do?

Writing Works can help. A former academic and specialist in written English with 30 years of experience teaching undergraduates and MA students on taught programmes, I have developed a suite of innovative specialist techniques to help students crack the nut of writing at university.