It can be seen that there are many English teachers who insist that students must write multiple essays every year so they can master the skills needed for post secondary writing. I used to be one of these them. However, assigning too many essays can be hard on not only the students who need to write them, but on those of us who have to do the grading. So, after years of trying to figure out the most effective way to help my students learn, I found ways to teach writing skills without grading essays as follows.

Firstly, it seems like a wild - even irresponsible - idea. After all, students going to college and university need to be prepared. Yes, they do. And my students did write essays in my classes. However, I learned, with lots of trying and tweaking, that there are many effective ways to teach students the skills they need that don't require a full paper.

The fact is that students need to practice the skills they need for success. And they need lots of feedback from us. But they will build those skills more quickly when they can learn them in a way that they engages them and keeps them from getting overwhelmed.

Secondly, if students have not been successful with essay writing in the past, the thought of diving into yet another one is not that appealing. But a fun, collaborative activity just may be. And while participating in that activity students will have the opportunity to hone their skills and build their confidence, making them more ready to be successful with the next writing assignment. You can also give students lots of just-in-time feedback during these activities, rather than taking home a pile of papers that take you days or weeks to grade.

The reason is that this began at the prewriting stage where they might do an outline just to get it filled in - rather than approaching it thoughtfully. One of my favorite class activities was showing them how to do this right with the "human outline." It takes a good portion of a class, but the focus and organization of my students’ essays went up exponentially after doing it. That's because they all got feedback on how to approach this prewriting step - and I didn't have to take their outlines in to give it to them.

It is clear that the visual aspect of the activity really helped them figure out the essential themes of the play, and allowed them the chance to organize and support an argument they would like to present. And once again, they learned essential essay writing skills and got to practice the prewriting steps for a literary analysis without having to write the whole essay. They did write one later in the semester, and these two activities gave them the skills and confidence they needed to write it well.