Planning, drafting and editing
English · Key Stage 2 · The School
Plan the shape, not the sentences
A plan is a list of what goes where: the sections, their order, and one line on each. It should take a few minutes. Writing whole sentences into a plan wastes the effort twice, and planning nothing means discovering halfway through that paragraph two belongs at the end. The plan is allowed to change — that is a sign it was doing something.
Draft badly on purpose
The single most useful habit is to write the first draft without stopping to correct. Stopping to fix a spelling breaks the thread of what you were saying, and the sentence you were about to write is gone. Get it all down, then go back. Professional writers do this and so should a Year 5 — a first draft is meant to be rough, and knowing that makes starting far easier.
Two different jobs
EDITING is about meaning: is the order right, is anything missing, is anything there twice, is a sentence doing nothing? PROOFREADING is about correctness: spelling, punctuation, grammar. Do them in that order — there is no point proofreading a paragraph you are about to delete. Reading your work aloud catches both, because your ear notices what your eye skips.
PLAN (5 min): five bullet points, in order, no sentences. DRAFT (20 min): write straight through without stopping to fix anything — stopping to correct kills momentum and you lose the thread. EDIT (10 min), and do it in two separate passes: first for MEANING (is the order right, is anything missing, does the ending land), then for MISTAKES (spelling, punctuation, tense). Doing both at once means doing neither well.