Hand out sentence starters, not blank pages

A blank page asks students to solve two problems at once: what to say, and how academic writing sounds. Sentence starters and frames remove the second problem so effort goes into the first. They're a staple of language-learner support for good reason, and they help far beyond that group: "The evidence suggests... however..." is a thinking structure, not a crutch. (Manning's education-agent-skills library ships an academic-language sentence-frame generator for exactly this.)

In practice

• Offer three starters per task, at different depths: one that opens a description, one a comparison, one an evaluation. Choosing a starter is itself a thinking move.
• Use them for talk as well as writing: discussion stems ("I'd challenge that because...") get your quieter students into the conversation (see "Let them rehearse in pairs").
• Fade them like any scaffold: frames early in the term, starters mid-term, blank page when the structures live in their heads.