Composition

Composition practice — plan it, print the paper, write it by hand, photograph the pages, check what we read back, then see what Zen Reader noticed.

Composition is for composition practice: the piece your child writes out by hand on paper, the way it is done at school. In a Chinese class that is 作文. The menu item used to be called Writing.

Your child's teacher sets the composition. This is the practice in between, and the record of what has been written.

Picking a title

Open Composition from the menu. You have three ways to start:

• Next up — a suggested title, chosen for your child.
• Other titles — the rest of the bank, to pick from yourself.
• Or use your own title — type the one the teacher actually set. This is the one to use for homework, and it is why the box is there.

Each title shows how long the piece should be — a minimum number of characters, or of words in the languages that count words rather than characters. The number comes from your child's year of schooling, which is on their reader profile.

Which titles are offered depends on two things on that same reader profile: the school year, so the bank offers titles for the year your child is actually in, and Written in — the language your child writes compositions in, which is separate from the language the app itself is shown in. It starts on Chinese. Set it to English and the English titles are offered instead, and the length is counted in words rather than characters.

Tap Start writing. Zen Reader records that the piece has been started, and opens the writing screen.

Some titles come with pictures

A few titles are picture compositions — 看图作文, the format used from about Primary 3. The screen shows a row of pictures to write about, and says "You will be writing about a set of pictures."

Those pictures are the illustrations from one of the example picture books your family already has, and nothing else from it. The book's own story is deliberately not shown: seeing it would turn write your own story from the pictures into a copying exercise.

If your family no longer holds that example book, the title still works — it is simply offered without the pictures, using the written description instead.

Plan it first

The writing screen opens with Plan it first — a few boxes to fill in before writing, the stage a Singapore classroom puts first. It is optional, and the screen says so: your child can start writing whenever they like, and an empty plan blocks nothing.

Which boxes appear depends on your child's year:

• Younger children get the four elements — When, Where, Who and What happened.
• From about Primary 3 they get the narrative shape instead — Opening, How it started, The big moment, How it turned out and Ending.

Each box carries a question rather than an instruction — "Who was there with you?", "Which part was the most exciting? Slow that part down." Your child answers in their own words. For a Chinese piece the box can also carry the term a teacher uses, with its pinyin — 开头 kāi tóu — beside the question. Show the planning boxes as on the reader profile chooses between the Chinese term and an explanation (the default), the Chinese term only and an explanation only. A piece written in another language always shows the question.

Each box starts three lines tall and grows as your child types; the grip at its corner drags it taller if they want more room in front of them.

Save the plan keeps it, and — this is the point of planning before printing — the plan is printed onto the writing paper, under the squares, on every sheet. So it is beside them while they write rather than on a screen they have put down. Plan after you print and you get a sheet without it.

Words you have learnt

For Chinese, a tray of suggested words appears under the plan — 好词好句. These are not generic "good words": they are words built from your child's own character list, at or below the level they have reached, plus the words on their spelling list this term. A word from this term's list is marked this term, because a teacher is more likely to expect those to be used.

Under the tray are five prompts for saying more — what they did, what their face did, what they said out loud, what they were thinking, and what could be seen, heard, smelt, tasted and touched.

The tray is Chinese-only, because it is built from a Singapore character list that no other language has. In another language your child gets the planning boxes and no tray.

1. Print your writing paper

Get the paper builds a PDF of proper composition paper — twenty squares across, one character to a square, with the title printed across the top, the plan underneath and a page number in the corner.

On Windows it opens a save dialog. On a Mac, an iPad, an iPhone or an Android device it opens the share sheet instead, so you can send it to a printer, to Files, or to someone else's device — the app cannot tell what you chose there, so it says the paper is ready to print rather than saved.

Two things on the sheet are printed by Zen Reader rather than written by your child, and both earn their place:

• The title across the top means the sheet can never be separated from the question it answers.
• The page number in the corner is what lets the pages be put back in order if they are photographed out of order. Without it a long piece comes back scrambled.

You get enough sheets for the target length, plus one spare, and never fewer than two — so nobody has to cram an ending into the margin.

2. Photograph each page

Your child writes the piece by hand. Then Add pages — one photo per sheet, in order, with the whole sheet in the frame. Up to eight pages; if you pick more than fit, Zen Reader adds what it can and tells you.

Each page is listed with its number, and can be removed again — the rest renumber themselves so what you see matches the order they will be sent in.

3. Check we read it correctly

Read my writing uploads the pages and reads them back. This takes a moment.

What comes back is what we think your child wrote, in an editable box, with a running count of characters or words underneath. Read it against the paper and fix anything we read wrongly.

Two things to look out for:

• A □ in the text means we could not read that square at all. It is deliberately an obvious mark rather than a plausible guess — a guess would look exactly like a correct reading, and nobody would know to fix it.
• "We are not sure of the page order" appears when the sheets carried no readable page number. Check the paragraphs are in the right order before you confirm.

Yes, that is what I wrote saves it. Nothing is counted, listed or totalled until that point: until your child has agreed the transcript, its length is the machine's opinion rather than a fact.

If your child closes the app before confirming, the pages and the reading are kept — they can come back and finish.

4. What Zen Reader noticed

This step appears only after the transcript is confirmed — nothing is ever pointed out on a reading nobody has agreed to. The heading itself says what it is and is not: This is not a mark. It points at particular sentences so your child can see what to look at next, and a parent can set aside anything that looks wrong.

Check my writing sends the confirmed text off to be looked at (see below), and what comes back is three things:

• What the piece covers. A short list of things a teacher looks for, each marked Covered, Not yet or Not sure: It has an opening; When, where, who, what; It fits the title. There is no score behind them — each is a yes-or-no a person could check by reading the piece. When, where, who, what is the four-element scaffold taught in the first two years, so for an older child it is marked Not this year rather than held against them. It fits the title is never marked Not yet: telling a child their whole idea was wrong is not something a machine should do, so a doubt is put to them as a question in the note under it instead.
• A line of countable facts — 3 wrong characters per 100 characters (or spelling mistakes per 100 words in English) and 5 sentences that describe something. A rate is shown only when there is enough writing for it to mean anything; a short piece shows none rather than a misleading zero.
• Findings. Each one quotes your child's own words, says what kind of thing it is — Wrong character, Punctuation, Structure, What it says, Word choice or Something else — explains it, and where it can offers One thing you could try.

A finding Zen Reader was not confident about is still shown, marked Not certain, and the screen says Needs your review — read those with your child rather than taking them as read. If nothing was worth mentioning, it says Nothing to point out rather than leaving the space blank.

Wrong characters were not checked appears when the piece runs across more than one sheet. Zen Reader cannot yet read across sheets accurately enough to say a character is wrong, and a wrong accusation against a child's own writing is worse than a missed one — so on a longer piece it looks at everything except 错别字, and says so.

Set aside — a Family Manager or Parent only, never the child — removes a finding that looks wrong. It is not deleted: it shows greyed with Set aside by a parent, and Put back restores it. A child cannot make their own mistakes disappear.

Analyse again asks for a fresh look. The new findings replace the old ones, except that anything a parent had set aside is kept on screen so the decision is not lost.

The findings are kept with the piece. What the piece covers and the line of facts are shown on the run that produced them: come back to the piece another day and you will see the findings and the summary, and Analyse again brings the other two back.

Whatever it finds, there is no mark and nowhere to put one. A parent who wants to know whether the piece is good should read it; what this step is for is the specific sentence to look at next.

Writing over time

Writing over time, from the button at the top of the Composition screen, is the fourth portfolio. (The button and the page kept their old name.) It shows:

• how much has been written, as a bar per week or per month — switch with By month;
• a total: how many pieces have been checked, and how many characters or words in all;
• every piece, with its title, when it was written, and its length. Open this piece goes back to it;
• Mistakes — 3 wrong characters per 100 characters, over 4 pieces that were checked (or spelling mistakes per 100 words in English). Until there is enough analysed writing for the number to mean anything it says Not enough checked writing yet to work this out, rather than showing a zero that reads as praise;
• What comes up most — the kinds of finding that have come up more than once, with a count, so a pattern is visible across pieces rather than one piece at a time. Until something has, it says so.

Only confirmed pieces are counted or plotted. A piece whose pages were photographed and never checked still appears in the list, so your child can go and finish it, but it adds nothing to any total — its length has not been agreed by a person. The two mistake measures are narrower again: they count only the pieces somebody pressed Check my writing on, so a piece nobody asked about cannot quietly pull the rate down.

There is no score and no grade on this page, and that is on purpose. What it reports is countable facts: is your child writing more, and what keeps coming up.

Unlike the reading, spelling and word-list portfolios, this one has no child picker — it shows the writing of whoever is signed in.

Setting a composition as a task

Write a composition is one of the kinds you can set under Tasks — for a family that has Composition; it is not offered otherwise. It is the only task that has no book: a writing title is not a book and never appears in the Family Library. Start on the task opens the Composition screen.

It ticks itself off when a piece has been written and the transcript confirmed — an unchecked machine reading of a child's handwriting can never complete homework. It carries no score, for the same reason nothing else here does; What Zen Reader noticed is not a result a task can be measured against.

If there are no titles in your language

Titles ship today for Chinese and English. Zen Reader does not fall back to another language's titles — a Chinese title in front of a child writing French would be worse than none — so when there are no titles for the language, the screen says so and the use your own title box still works. A teacher's title can always be used, whatever the language.

The planning boxes work in every language. The word tray does not; see above.

It needs the AI helpers turned on

Reading the photographed pages sends them to an AI service, and so does Check my writing (which sends the confirmed text, never the photographs), so both need the AI helpers switched on for your family — the same permission the rest of the app asks for once. See Settings.

There is no offline alternative for either. Unlike reading aloud or scanning a book page, no engine on the phone or laptop can read a page of a child's handwriting as free prose, or comment on it. If you have turned the AI helpers off, those two steps cannot run at all — planning, the paper, the record of what has been written and the length figures all still work; the two mistake measures on Writing over time stay empty.

What is kept

• The photographs of the pages, in your family's own storage.
• The transcript — both what we read and what your child confirmed.
• The plan, the title, and the length of the confirmed piece.
• What Zen Reader noticed, including anything a parent set aside. A finding is never deleted; one a later analysis no longer makes is simply kept out of view.

What it will not do

It will not give a mark, and that is a decision rather than a gap: a number for a composition is a teacher's judgement, and a machine's would be wrong often enough to be worse than none. It will not rewrite a sentence for your child. And on a piece photographed as more than one sheet it will not say a character is wrong, for the reason given above.

For handwriting that is marked word by word from a photo, see Spelling practice — the spelling dictation test does exactly that, for single words against a known list.