Teaching Writing: How to Help Students Become Concise Writers

Writing Teachers’ Struggles

We all see it: the blank stares at digital documents that indicate students have no clue where to go next. Sure, you have described that students need to write more concisely and that they need to revise, but somehow that tends to go right over students’ heads. They need a more explicit breakdown on exactly how to write more concisely.

In this article, we will discuss different strategies of writing, so that you can help your students implement those strategies. We will also cover some ways that you can incorporate this information into your classroom to make teaching these strategies more effective.  

How to Write Concisely

In order to become a more concise writer, students can use the following writing strategies to revise their drafts. 

1. Free Writing: 
• Free write for a designated amount of time without worrying about revisions or edits. Get out all of your ideas before you worry about being concise about it.
2. Clarify Information: 
• Create a clearer focus with fewer words. Ask yourself: What is the point of this sentence? This should show you what key ideas you need to include and what you don't. Try to rewrite the sentence without looking at the previous one. And ultimately, don't try to "sound" academic; it usually just makes things more confusing.
3. Quoting and Paraphrasing: 
• Pair down quotes to the most essential 5-7 words and lead into this portion with contextual paraphrasing. Find the keywords in a quote to focus only on what you need. 
4. Word Choice: 
• Choose specific words that can be used instead of an entire phrase and look for redundant language you can take out of sentences/paragraphs. 
5. Editing: 
• When editing, you want to take time between your revisions so that you are clearer on what you need to get out of the editing process. You can read aloud, ask a friend, or focus on patterns of issues you have had in the past. 

Strategies for Writing an Essay

Students can use the above strategies to revise, but should ultimately take them one at a time. When teaching these strategies, break them down into smaller parts and help students look for each one in their essay. This helps students focus and encourages multiple rounds of revision (when we know that often this is not the case at home). 

By incorporating strategies for free writing, clarifying information, quoting & paraphrasing, changing word choice, and editing, students can feel more confident in their revisions. When students know what to look for, and have enough practice with revision, they can then implement those strategies on their own. 

Concise Writing Exercises

Once you have initially taught the strategies for concise writing, you can then build consistent exercises into your classroom to help reinforce that learning. I am always a proponent of completing writing exercises within specific contexts to be more effective; as such, I have students revisit previous writing samples from class instead of trying to have them edit a singular sentence out of context. Sometimes a quick bell ringer where students are revising an older piece of writing can help them understand that writing can always be revised and that writing is recursive and contextual. 

Below are some quick prompts that students can use to revise their work, based on the strategies above:

1. Free Writing: 
1. Give students a prompt and have them write nonstop for 5 minutes on that topic to get their ideas down. 
2. Clarify Information: 
1. Take a look at a paragraph that you have written, highlight the parts that explicitly answer the prompt and add to the parts that need a better connection to the prompt/thesis you were trying to create.
3. Quoting and Paraphrasing: 
1. Find a quote that is a full sentence. Look for the keywords in the sentence that are most important. Paraphrase the first or last part of the quote that you do not need quoted and trim the quoted material down to 5-7 words. 
4. Word Choice: 
1. Find a phrase or sentence in your writing that is becoming confusing because there are too many words in the sentence (this may be repeated information or language or synonyms). Find a better word that describes this idea (ie depressed versus sad) or delete any extra information that is repeated and no longer necessary. 
5. Editing: 
1. Look for a pattern that you have seen in your writing in the past. Find this in your current writing and highlight it whenever it comes up. Focus on one type of pattern at a time. 

If you would like some pre-made activities and resources to share with your students, head over to the full Writing Concisely Course, or (if you do not want the video content) just the ebook of resources from my TPT Store.

Overall Strategies for Teaching Writing

For each of the strategies we have covered here, there are a multitude of ways that we can add them to the classroom. My favorites include stations and conferences. These seem to be the most effective ways to give students bite-sized content, explicit feedback, and make sure that they are hearing/implementing the commentary that you give them. 

You can even make each of these strategies into a different digital station using the Writing Concisely Course I have available in the Life Skills Academy. The course includes a full ebook, activities for each strategy, and a video for each lesson in the course. Plus, you get the Google Slide Deck, so you can teach these strategies using ready-made curriculum with or without the videos depending on how best your students learn. Only you know what will help your students best, I am just here to give you ready-made resources that can lessen your prep time.  

If you are using these different strategies in stations, you can also have one of those stations be a small group meeting where you workshop directly with students on a specific aspect of their writing. Maybe you have had them revise on their own and discuss specific changes, maybe you use one student’s writing as a model you can work through together, maybe you use this as a quick peer review session to help students evaluate their own work better. The possibilities are endless! 

Let me know in the comments below what you feel you need more help with when teaching writing to high school students and I will be sure to see what I can do to support you.

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