Argument first, then sentences

My students in Hanoi write carefully. They have memorised complex structures, linking phrases and a bank of impressive adjectives. Then they score 6.0 on Task 2 and cannot understand why, because every sentence looks like a 7.

When I read those essays aloud with them, the pattern is nearly always the same. Four paragraphs, four opinions, no argument. Each paragraph asserts something and decorates it. Nothing in paragraph three depends on paragraph two, so there is nothing for the reader to follow.

A beautiful sentence cannot rescue a paragraph that has nothing to prove.

So we now spend the first ten minutes of every writing hour with the pen used only for planning. One sentence stating the position. Two reasons, each written as a full claim rather than a topic word. One concession that is genuinely uncomfortable. One example per reason, specific enough to be checkable.

Students resist this because it feels like time not spent writing, and because a plan reveals immediately when someone has no opinion on the question. That discomfort is useful: it is much cheaper to discover an empty argument in the plan than in paragraph three at minute thirty.

The other change was cutting memorised phrases. "It is widely acknowledged that" earns nothing and costs eight words. We replaced the bank of phrases with a bank of moves - concede, distinguish, quantify, exemplify - and the sentences became simpler and the bands went up.