According to linguistics researchers Dan Slobin and Thomas Bever, children build up schemas are ‘formed on the basis of linguistic experience and are used for recognising utterances as interpretable.’

As words and sentences pour in to our consciousness, we become attuned to a variety of sentence forms and build a map in our long-term memories of the rules for putting sentences together when we want to speak or write.

There are many reasons why children find it difficult to write, but let’s look at two very crude examples of hypothetical children who many of us will recognise.

The starting point for these units is very often a huge, abstract idea such as ‘plot development’ or ‘creating characters that the reader can empathise with’. Multiple elements are presented to the children all at the same time.

While novice and struggling writers are trying to wrap their h...