Why Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect—It Makes Permanent
David Didau’s recent piece, Three Rules for Effective Practice, hits at the heart of something we see every day in writing instruction: students don’t rise to the level of our intentions—they fall to the level of their practice. If they repeatedly practise mistakes, those mistakes don’t dissolve; they calcify.
This research-backed perspective aligns directly with how Writing with Design approaches writing instruction. Writing is an incredibly high-load task. Students must juggle ideas, organization, vocabulary, syntax, mechanics, and conventions—all at the same time. If we ask them to write extended pieces before fluency with foundational skills, we aren’t building mastery; we’re building habits of error.
That’s why Writing with Design places intentional emphasis on mechanics and conventions in the early Levels of our rubric. In short, manageable writing tasks—whether for our youngest writers or for older students building new habits—mechanics carry more weight. This ensures that students practise correctness, not carelessness. No teacher wants to read an essay riddled with convention errors; we prevent that by building precision early and protecting it through repetition.
And because every subject deserves high-quality writing, our rubrics are identical across all content areas. The expectations don’t shift whether students are writing about Macbeth, McCarthy, or mitosis. Clear ideas, accurate conventions, and strong organization remain the standard everywhere.
Didau’s distinction between knowledge problems and practice problems is especially powerful. A student who knows the capitalization rule but keeps writing “i went” doesn’t need reteaching; they need retraining. WwD’s Skill Focus Activities, Mind Designs, and scaffolded Levels are designed for exactly this—purposeful, correct, repeated practice that moves students from “I can do it once” to “I can’t not do it.”
Practice isn’t what happens after learning.
Practice is learning—and when designed well, it produces writers who are accurate, fluent, and confident.
