English as craft, taught at the level of voice.

English is a craft, and like any craft — woodworking, ceramics, bookbinding — I teach it through steady attention, judgement, and corrected attempt. The student reads closely, writes often, and studies under a tutor whose craft is passed on page by page. A rubric can answer writing that already exists. It can't produce it. Excellence comes from the cycle of writing, reading and editing — not from smoothing over errors to satisfy a rubric, but from paying attention to what caused them and working on that directly.

Such is the work of a craft: slow to acquire, durable once acquired.

"Good" and "bad" writer is too simple a split. Good writing is personal, specific articulation — not raw talent. Every student arrives with their own habits, hold-ups, and half-formed instincts. That specificity is the "voice" I work with, not against, when I guide a student toward their best work.

What looks like natural ability in a young writer is almost always accumulated practice: regular reading and writing, and someone reading the work with care. It doesn't matter when that started. It matters that it can start now. A student who begins late isn't behind — they're just earlier in the same process.

My job is to provide those conditions on purpose. I read what the student writes. I respond carefully. I ask them to write again.

Every error has a history. "I got this wrong because of that" leaves a student solving a puzzle with half the pieces missing. I look instead for the assumptions and earlier confusions behind the mistake, and work on those directly — that's where understanding starts. Careful responses open a student to a real dialogue: rationalising choices, weighing options, finding footing for their own voice.

Great writers haven't made fewer mistakes. They've made more. Treating an error as something to understand, not just correct, teaches a student to read their own work critically — without fear of being wrong, and often looking for what's wrong on purpose, because that's how they find what comes next.

Students should try things in any form — comprehension, close analysis, rhetoric, persuasion. Each one builds the same underlying skills: clarity, specificity, fluency, invention. What a rubric can't capture is found by pushing a student's thinking somewhere a fixed classroom sequence can't reach. Every student's creative instinct is their own; teaching it through one uniform text-type, framework or sequence risks losing exactly what makes their writing theirs.

So working at the level of the individual student isn't a nice extra — it's the method and the goal. As method, it means paying attention to a student's actual writing: their range, their gaps, what they're reaching for. As a goal, it's what I'm after: a writer whose voice is recognisably theirs, and who trusts themselves enough to try something they haven't tried before.