Every teacher has seen it. A student receives a carefully marked essay, glances at the grade, and puts it away. All the thought that went into the comments disappears.

Redrafting is the most reliable way to change this. When students have to rewrite part of an essay in response to feedback, they engage with the comments in a way that reading alone cannot achieve. For An Inspector Calls, where the same skills repeat across many essays, the improvement carries over.

The trick is to keep redrafting short and specific. A full rewrite of a five-paragraph essay is rarely realistic. A targeted rewrite of one paragraph usually is.

The steps below describe a routine that fits within normal lesson time.

Choose one paragraph to improve

After marking, ask each student to select the weakest paragraph, or assign one based on your comments. They rewrite it using the feedback, within a strict time limit of ten to fifteen minutes. The constraint keeps the task focused and mirrors the pressure of the exam.

• Return essays with a single priority target rather than a list
• Give students dedicated lesson time to act on it
• Ask them to highlight the changes they made
• Have them explain in one sentence why the new version is stronger
• Collect the rewrite and give a quick tick or short comment

Make the improvement visible

Ask students to keep the original and the redraft side by side. Seeing the difference builds confidence, and it gives you evidence of progress. It also helps students understand what a stronger paragraph looks like.

Some teachers use a coloring system, with one color for evidence, another for analysis and a third for context, to show where the revised version has improved.

Time the cycle carefully

The gap between writing and receiving feedback should be short. If the essay comes back weeks later, the student will have lost the thread. A cycle of write, feedback, redraft over a single week is ideal.

Marking speed is what makes this possible. It is one reason many teachers look for ways to shorten the first pass of feedback.

Supporting the cycle with technology

AI-assisted grading tools such as GraideMind can return a rubric-based first draft of feedback quickly, which makes a weekly write, feedback and redraft cycle more realistic. You review the comments, adjust them, and use classroom time to help students act on them.

The habit of revising, more than any single comment, is what raises the quality of exam writing.