Improving Economic Writing at A-Level Part 1: Sentence Level Activities

Earlier this week I ran a session at the Bank of England Teacher Conference on improving writing in economics A-level. This is a write-up of that session, partly so the delegates have it all in one place, and partly so anyone who couldn't make it can pinch the bits that are useful. All of the worksheets are available in the download at the end of the article.

I'll be honest here and say that I haven't proofread this, but I knew that if I waited until I had it, it would be forever sitting in my drafts. I realise it's a very risky strategy to use this approach for an article that's literally about improving writing.

Why bother with writing?

I think there are four reasons it deserves our attention.

Economics is worth sharing. If we genuinely believe economics is valuable, we have to be able to communicate it, and the lessons we learn from it. We look at really important stuff that affects a lot of people's lives, so we need to be able to say clearly what would make those lives better.

Students only get marks for what's on the page. It doesn't matter what's in their head; it matters what they write down. So they need a really good way of getting it out of their brain and onto the paper.

It's a life skill. Being a better writer helps students well beyond the exam hall, in whatever they go on to do.

Better writing leads to better thinking. This is the one I find most exciting. A better framework for writing opens up a better framework for thinking. Joan Didion put it better than I can:

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”

I suspect a lot of us would recognise that. The process of writing is part of how we work out what we think.

Why it's tricky

The biggest challenge is time.

Our course content is huge. As well as the specification itself, we teach all the contextual stuff sitting behind it. We're already tight on time, and writing instruction takes time, so there's a real trade-off. I'll come back to this, because I think it can be less brutal than it first looks.

That creates a free rider problem. It’s easy to leave writing to the other teachers, so we can focus on the content.

Economics is a funny thing to write

There are subject-specific ways of writing economics that make this genuinely hard. Economics sits right at the intersection of science and the humanities, and for a lot of students this is the first time they've had to bridge that gap in their writing. They aren't writing wholly like a scientist, nor wholly like a historian or a politician, and that in-between can be tricky.

On top of that there are skills they may never have met before and which often need teaching explicitly: writing about graphs and what they show, describing diagrams (shifts and effects), and talking about models, including explaining their assumptions and limits.

Three goals that don't always line up

This is a Venn diagram I bring up a lot. As economic teachers, we're often trying to meet multiple goals at once. In the case of writing, I have 3 goals: better grades, which open doors to university and beyond; better writers; and better economists.

It would be lovely if those goals always pulled in the same direction, but they don't necessarily. We don't have to work solely in the middle, but it helps to be aware of which bit we're in, and to cherry-pick the activities that make the best progress towards all three at once.

To make things even more complicated, economists write differently with each other (peer to peer, in journals) than they do for the outside world (government, business, current affairs). This means we need to prepare students for both.

A very wide range in one room

Most students start economics at 16, so by the time they reach us there's a huge spread of writing ability. Some are very confident writers; some are very much still finding their feet. We have to manage all of that within one classroom.

It doesn't help that economics keeps unusual company. A really common combination is something like Economics, Maths and Physics, which means for some students economics is the only place they do any extended writing at all. This means they might not be getting essay writing instruction elsewhere, and they also might not consider themselves strong essay writers, so we shouldn't assume the essay-writing muscle is already there.

All of which means students need different levels of support. However, we need to be careful that the support we are providing for our weaker students isn't limiting our stronger students  We need to ensure the scaffold doesn't become a cage.

Reading feeds writing

No talk about writing would have been complete without a brief mention of reading and vocabulary.Better vocabulary makes reading feel more accessible, which means students read more, which means they meet more words, which builds vocabulary, and round we go. It's the Matthew Effect: the ‘word-rich’ get ‘word-richer’. Much like the virtuous and vicious cycles we teach in economics, it's lovely once you're in it; the hard part is finding the way in.

All reading is good reading, but some types stretch students' writing a little more. Non-fiction is slightly better, and better still is what's sometimes called NNNF: Non-Narrative Non-Fiction. A lot of economics writing is non-narrative; we're not telling a story, we're analysing. Yet much of the non-fiction students meet (historical accounts, biographies, news stories) is narrative, so we need to deliberately expose them to the non-narrative kind. Even better if it's in an economic context, so the reading works double-time.

For wider reading aimed at students, three good starting points are Curious Economist (very short articles written with economics students in mind), the Economics Observatory (research summaries that assume no technical knowledge), and FT for Schools (free articles with questions written by economics teachers).

Actually getting students to read is its own planning job, and I'd strongly recommend systematising it. They need repeated, prolonged exposure over time; the occasional article doesn't do nearly as much as a regular habit. A few systems I've written up:

•      Free choice read, where each week students pick an Economics Observatory article to summarise

•      Class read, my experiment in reading Can't We Just Print More Money? as a class

Vocabulary

It helps to think about vocabulary in three tiers.

Tier 1 is everyday speech, the common words we use in conversation. We don't need to teach these; students build them themselves. Tier 3 is subject-specific terminology (externality, elasticity), our bread and butter. Tier 2 is the academic vocabulary that turns up far more in writing than in speech, and it's the tier we tend to underuse and under-respect, even though it's often the real barrier to better writing.

Tier 3: we're probably already on it

We do a lot of good Tier 3 teaching already, so I won't dwell here, but a few things help:

• Use etymology to link words together: homogeneous is homo (“same”) plus genus (“type”), so “same type”.

• Watch out for false friends (a term borrowed from MFL), words that mean something different in economics than in everyday life: normal, necessity, luxury, investment. Keep an eye on words that differ between economics and business too, since that's another common combination: “sales” in business often means revenue, whereas sales maximising is a specific quantity in economics.

• Test definitions explicitly (students often understand a word but can't find the words to define it). Students need fluency with these terms.

• Model precision upgrades, pushing from “externality” to “positive consumption externality”. Tutor2u's magnifying-glass exercises are good for this.

Tier 2: the one we neglect

We can't teach all of Tier 2, so the trick is to identify the powerful words and phrases and teach those explicitly. Exactly which words depends on your students and your context, but if you're not sure where to begin, start with interaction words:

amplify · exacerbate · compound · mitigate · offset · temper · negate · alleviate · curb

They're useful in students' wider lives as well as in essays, but students rarely reach for them without explicit instruction. (I'm slowly putting together a word-a-week classroom calendar of useful Tier 2 economics vocabulary, which I'll share when it's done.)

A few more ways to build Tier 2:

1. Be aware of it when you set reading; I really rate Rewordify.com for this. I've written about it here.

2. Widen the input beyond reading: more formal podcasts, news and documentaries all help. See Indy Hour

3. Get students placing words on a scale. Find a more or less extreme version of a word and work out where it sits. This is useful when students learn a new word so they understand how to use it, but it is alo brilliant for exam questions built around extreme words like “inevitable”. The Extent-o-meter worksheet in the pack works through exactly this.

Sentence-level practice

Right, back to that time trade-off. we can safely say there is one, but I think it's less extreme than we sometimes assume, because there are situations where we can practise writing and content at the same time. The activities below all improve writing structures, which in turn improve thinking structures, while also drilling actual economics. If these are of any interest, I recommend The Writing Revolution. You can read about my initial thoughts way back when I first read it here.

Appositives

This is a classic from The Writing Revolution and it works beautifully with economics. An appositive is an extra clause that gives information about a noun. So “The Bank of England ran a conference for teachers” becomes “The Bank of England, the UK's central bank, ran a conference for teachers.”

It's super useful in essays. If a student hasn't explained enough, or hasn't shown enough knowledge, you can underline the word and write 'appositive' in the margin. It's especially good for keyword-heavy topics and for explaining data.

The worksheet works triple-time: it gives students information (reminding them, say, of a common criticism of GDP), it tests their understanding (they have to generate information about a given word), and it drills the sentence structure so it becomes more natural in their own writing.

Students find this baffling the very first time, so model a couple together, and bold the target word to help. After that it gets easier fast, and it makes a nice easy task to write on the board if you need to fill a few mins.

A more cautious, impersonal voice

Students (especially those who also do other essay subjects) often write in the wrong tone: too certain and too personal. GCSE can quietly encourage “in conclusion, I believe that...”, and we want to move them towards something more impersonal: hedge a bit more, and drop the “I”.

A few strategies I like. The first is Clive: invent a class member (there are very few actual Clives in any school) to act as a scapegoat. Clive uses all the over-confident, too-personal language, so “you're sounding a bit like Clive there” becomes useful shorthand. The second is a marking code, so students know exactly when to correct themselves. The third is folding stylistic errors into a spot-the-error activity alongside the usual misconceptions. This makes the task a bit more tricky as students have to work out whether the statement is factually incorrect, stylistically incorrect, or both.

Writing that acknowledges assumptions

It matters that economists acknowledge their assumptions, and students learn the importance of assumptions early in the course. The challenge is using that later, in their own writing. Students are usually good at using assumptions as an evaluation tool (“this theory assumes that...”) but less comfortable acknowledging an assumption as they write. The phrasing is the hard bit.

Therefore, we need to practise the phrasing explicitly. When an assumption comes up, ask students to have a go out loud at how they'd word a sentence that acknowledges it. if students struggle with this, just stick to one sentence starter (e.g.,'assuming that') to get them comfortable.The worksheet gets students to spot and rewrite assumptions using sentence starters: one statement assumes that a result depends on the elasticity of imports and exports, so they begin with “Provided that...” and get used to the mechanism. Double-time again: they identify the assumption (good evaluation practice) and rehearse how to phrase it.

Integrating evidence

Students usually remember to use evidence, but often inefficiently, quoting great swathes of text. We want them weaving it in more naturally, and more economically. It's a great thing to practise with any assigned reading, especially shorter pieces.

Give students an example box of ways to reference a text: paraphrase with a line reference, paraphrase with the line reference in brackets, a separate sentence with a quotation, a colon, a clipped quote, a truncated quote with an ellipsis, and a quotation in brackets. In the exam it doesn't matter which they choose, but fluency lets them pick the most efficient option in the moment, and the clipped and truncated styles in particular help them write more tightly.

Then give them an article (line numbers help; I use AI to add them). The Curious Economist is great for this because the articles are short. It works double-time once more: they read and find the evidence (good for application), then practise writing it up in the given style. The worksheet in the pack uses a piece on AI in banking.

“If... we might expect to see...”

This structure is so flexible and useful that even weaker students get a lot out of it. It's brilliant for setting out and testing success criteria (more on that shortly), and for moving from the abstract to the observable when you've been stuck in theory: if there is a recession we might expect to see closed shops and more UK based holidays. It works for market application too: if there are inefficiencies in the housing market, we might expect to see homelessness, properties sitting unsold, overcrowding, spare rooms going unused etc. and it's particularly handy for AQA's 4-mark questions and the 10-markers on the synoptic paper.

“Whilst...” statements, for points in tension

The “whilst” statement is the clearest example I know of better writing structures leading to better thinking. Without the vocabulary and structures to express two things that are true at the same time, it's genuinely hard to think through the tension between them. in general, I've noticed three approaches to how students might handle points that are in tension with each other:

•      Contradictory – claims that cancel out. “The government should be worried because the claimant count is rising, but should not be worried because vacancies are at a record.” This is contradictory and hurts students' thinking because it produces some cognitive dissonance

•      Two-handed – sees both sides. “On the one hand the rising claimant count could worry the government; on the other, record vacancies might make them less worried.” The hedging recognises two ways of thinking, but doesn't really tell students what to do with that information.

•      Prioritised judgement – weighs both, then commits. “Whilst vacancies are at a record high, the government should worry because the claimant count is rising.” Both are true, but the emphasis falls deliberately on the second.

The worksheet gives students two sets of statements. They decide whether each pair is in support or in tension, then write a statement accordingly. They struggle at first, so do the first few together, but then you can repeat it for lots of different topics; it really suits anything with two clear sides, like national debt or intervention in the market for vapes. Another useful application of this structure is when looking at policy choices. It can either be used to acknowledge the limitations of a policy while still affirming that it works, or to show preference for one policy over another. for the former, you can use the random policy generator, and for the latter, you can use the which policy wins tool as easy extra practise without having to make your own worksheets

Improving Writing Economics A-Level Delegate Resource Pack.pdf

Download PDF • 477KB