Everything you need to use Wake Comprehension.Essay.Ap — the model essays, the drills and the Learn English pages, the eight steps that take a learner from a bare topic to a finished composition, what the app marks and what it will never mark, and how not to lose their work.
For app version 1.0 · for learners of about 10 and over
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A learner of about ten or over wants to write a composition — a description, a story, a letter, an argument — and there is no teacher sitting beside them. This app walks them from the bare topic to a finished piece, in eight steps, and then to somebody who can mark it.
It is for continuous writing in English. Descriptive essays, narrative essays, stories, and the kind of composition an examination paper asks for.
This app does not mark the writing. It marks the drills — comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, grammar and the seven Learn English drills — and nothing else. It has no opinion about whether a composition is good, and it will never pretend to have one.
Writing is marked by a person who can read what the learner meant by it. Step 7 of the app says so in as many words, and step 8 exists so the learner can write down the mark that person gave them.
So there are two kinds of mark in the record book, and the app never lets them blur together. Drill scores the app awarded itself, because a drill answer is right or wrong and a computer can say so. Essay marks the learner typed in, because an essay is not right or wrong and a computer cannot.
This is the half of the app that has nothing to do with the learner’s own essay. They can use it on any evening, for ten minutes, without starting anything. Two big buttons on the home screen: Model essays and Drills.
For every topic the app knows, there are three finished essays, written the way an examiner hopes to see them. The three are deliberately unalike: a different set of words, a different way into the subject, and a different country. The market essays are set in Kumasi, in Delhi and in Cusco. The rainy day is Accra, Kerala and Manchester. Reading all three of one topic teaches something no single essay can: there is no one right answer, only words chosen well or badly.
Underneath each essay is the list of words it leans on, with their meanings. That is the lesson made plain — the words you choose are the essay.
The model essays are for reading. A pupil cannot select the text, copy it, right-click it, download it or print it; the essay hides itself the moment they switch to another app; and their own name is printed faintly across every one, so a picture of one is traceable back to whoever took it.
What no app on earth can stop is a screenshot. A phone takes one with two buttons that a web page never hears about, and anybody can photograph a screen with a second phone. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What the watermark does is make a copied essay useless to hand in, which is the part that actually matters.
The learner chooses which one. Every round is twelve questions, marked as they go, and every answer — right or wrong — is followed by the reason.
The words for the vocabulary and spelling drills come from the model essays they have read, or from their own word book — and, when they are working on an essay of their own, from that essay’s own word list.
The app writes every drill score straight into the record book itself, the moment the round ends. The learner cannot change it and neither can anybody else. That is exactly the opposite of the essay marks in step 8, which the learner types in by hand — and the record book keeps the two apart on purpose. See chapter 10.
A card on the home screen called Learn English holds seven parts. Each is a page to read and a drill of up to twelve questions, marked by the app like every other drill and written into the record book. None of the seven opens the writing page at step 5 — that still opens only on vocabulary and spelling, on the learner’s own words.
About four in ten questions in every round come back to what the learner got wrong before, until they get it right.
The voice is the phone’s own. It says most words well, but on an unusual word it can put the stress in the wrong place, and some phones only have an American voice. Where the voice and the written guide disagree, the written guide is right — it follows British English, as WAEC does. You can choose another voice in Settings → Speaking. Nothing the learner says is heard or recorded: there is no microphone in this app.
The age matters more here than in the other Wake apps. It sets how many pages the app asks for and how long an examination would allow — a 10-year-old is asked for far less than a 16-year-old. You can change it later in Settings.
In Chrome: the three dots, then Add to Home screen. On an iPhone: the share button, then Add to Home Screen. It then opens like any other app and works with no internet at all.
Settings, the report, support and erasing anything sit behind a small multiplication question. It is not a password — it is a speed bump, and it is enough to stop a learner wandering into the settings by accident.
▲ Back to the contentsEvery essay is one journey of eight steps. The app shows them as a map, with a tick on what is done and a Start here mark on what comes next.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Choose your topic | The kind of writing first, then the topic — from a bank of examination-style topics, or their own. |
| 2. Gather your words | The words this topic needs, with their meanings. They are kept for ever. |
| 3. Make your plan | Eight questions. The answers become the paragraphs. |
| 4. Punctuation, then drills | A short lesson, then practice on their own words. |
| 5. Write it | Real A4 paper, a page target, and an examination clock. |
| 6. Save it and send it | A check-it-yourself list, then WhatsApp, email, print, anything. |
| 7. Get it marked | By a person. What to be careful of. |
| 8. Your record book | The mark, written down honestly by the learner. |
A learner may leave at step 2 in September and find it waiting at step 2 in November. Nothing is ever tidied away or timed out, and an essay is never “overdue”. My essays lists every one they have begun with how far it got.
Every step stays open at all times. It is a map, not a corridor. The one exception is step 5, and even that has a way past — see chapter 6.
▲ Back to the contentsThis is the step that makes the rest possible, and it used to be the one a learner was most likely to skip. It cannot be skipped now, because the app does it.
The moment they open step 2, the app has already chosen about thirteen words — the words this particular topic needs, each one shown with its meaning and with a sentence using it. For a market: haggle, hawker, clamour, laden. For a story about fear: terrified, bewildered, relieved. The learner reads them. They do not pick them.
The choosing is not random. It takes a word from every list the topic reaches for, so a register is never all describing-words and no verbs; it quietly passes over words they have already mastered; and it deliberately brings back words that beat them in an earlier essay.
There is one button: Choose me a different set. Each time it is pressed the words come back a little easier — genuinely so, not as a gesture. This matters more than it looks: it is what a learner stuck at the step 5 gate is being sent here to do (see chapter 7).
Add a word of your own is still there and still theirs. A word the learner adds is never thrown out when they ask for a different set.
Four linking words — however, meanwhile, consequently, furthermore — are in every register, whatever the topic is about. This is deliberate. They are what holds one paragraph to the next, they are the single thing most young writers are short of, and they are the cheapest improvement available to a composition.
Every word ever chosen goes into My word book on the home screen, across every essay. After a term that is a real vocabulary the learner built, one topic at a time — not a list somebody handed them. Both the essay’s word list and the whole word book can be saved as a plain file to keep, print or send.
A learner can also put any word they like into the word book — a word met in a book, a lesson or a conversation — with what it means in their own words, and a sentence of their own if they want one. They can change or remove these later. The words the app chose cannot be changed.
The app cannot check a word it does not know — not its meaning and not its spelling. So a learner’s own word comes round in the meaning drill but never in the spelling drill: a word typed wrongly and then drilled for spelling would be practised wrongly until it stuck. If it is a word the app already knows, the app fills in anything left empty and the word goes into both drills like any other. The same holds for a word added in step 2 of an essay.
Find a word, on the home screen and in the word book, works the other way round from a dictionary. The learner types what they mean in a few words — an item bought at a low price — and can say what kind of word they want: a naming word, a describing word, a doing word, a word that says how or when, or a joining word. The app offers up to three of the closest words it knows (bargain), each with its meaning and a sentence, and a button to put it in the word book. From there it comes round in the vocabulary and spelling drills until it is known — so describing a word and finding it is a way for a learner to drill themselves.
Be clear about what it is. It does not understand the description. It compares the learner’s words with the meanings of the words it holds — a little over four hundred at first, with more to be added — and with words that mean nearly the same. So it will sometimes offer a word that is close but not right, and sometimes find nothing, and it says so. The learner is the judge of whether a word fits, and the meaning and sentence are there so they can be. Nothing typed here leaves the device.
There is no clever computer service behind this. The word lists are written into the app, and the topic is matched to them by the plain words in it. That is why it costs nothing for each learner, works with no connection at all, and never sends a child’s topic anywhere.
A blank page defeats a child. A question does not.
So the app does not ask for an outline. It asks eight plain questions, and the answers become the outline. For a description: What does it look like from far away? What can you hear there? What is the one detail nobody else would notice? For a story: What did they want? What went wrong? How did it end?
One line per answer is enough. Every question has an example underneath it showing the length expected.
A question that does not fit the topic can be changed. Under every question is Change this question. The learner types a question of their own, one that suits their topic better, and it takes the app’s place for this essay only; the next essay starts with the app’s eight again. Put the original back undoes it, and an answer already written is kept either way. In the reading route below, a paragraph from a changed question stands on its own, without the joining line the app would otherwise put in front of it, because that line was written for the app’s own question.
Then Turn my answers into a plan makes one paragraph heading out of each answer. The learner can reword them, move them up and down, take them out, and add their own. Getting the order right is what planning actually is.
Because the eight questions are completely different for each kind. A story planned with a description’s questions comes out as a description. If a learner changes the kind of writing later, the app tells them the plan will be cleared and asks first.
When the plan is made, the app asks which of two things the learner is doing today:
Every sentence in it that says anything is the learner’s own answer from the plan, with a capital and a full stop put on it. What the app adds is the joining — an opening line for each paragraph, in the right order for that kind of writing, carrying the linking words that hold one paragraph to the next.
The app does not compose anything and does not understand the topic. There is no service behind it and nothing is sent anywhere: it works with the internet switched off, like the rest of this app. An essay genuinely written to order would mean sending a child’s work to somebody else’s computer, and this project does not do that.
So it is a scaffold, not a finished piece by a writer. Its value is that a learner who cannot start sees that their own notes already have the shape of an essay in them. The screen says so every time it is opened, and so does the report.
Neither door is ever locked. A learner on route B can press I am ready to write it myself now at any time and steps 5 to 8 open up; a learner on route A who gets stuck can go back and read their built essay from the journey map. Route B is preparation for route A, never a replacement for it.
Route B drills vocabulary, spelling and grammar — not comprehension. That is deliberate. A comprehension question has to be written by a person who has read the passage and thought about it, which is exactly why the thirty model essays carry hand-written questions. Anything the app could manufacture about a learner’s own notes would only ask them to find their own sentence among four of their own sentences: a thin exercise wearing comprehension’s name, and it would make the drill mean less everywhere else. So comprehension stays what it has always been.
The built essay says so on the screen and offers the honest alternative: read one of the three model essays on that very topic, and the comprehension drill opens on questions a person wrote. For a learner who invented their own topic, it offers the whole list instead.
The record book and the report never confuse the two routes. A reading-route essay is reported as read and drilled, not written, and says in plain words that nobody wrote or marked a composition for it.
▲ Back to the contentsSix things, and nothing else: full stops and capitals, commas, the apostrophe, speech marks, question and exclamation marks, and when to start a new paragraph. Each one is shown wrong first, then right, because that pair is what a learner actually remembers.
It is not a grammar course and it must never become one. These are where the easiest marks in a composition are lost.
Step 4 opens the same drill chooser described in chapter 2, but with the learner’s own essay behind it, so the vocabulary and spelling questions are built from the word list this essay chose for them rather than a generic one. The drill and the essay are then the same piece of work.
Everything is marked instantly. A word they miss comes round more often. Missing a word is never scolded — the right answer is shown with its meaning and its sentence, and the round moves on.
Only vocabulary and spelling, on this essay’s own words. Comprehension and grammar are recorded and reported and go into the record book like everything else, but they do not unlock step 5 — because the gate is about the words the learner is about to use this afternoon. Each tile on the chooser says plainly which sort it is, so nobody drills for an hour and then finds the door still shut.
The writing page stays locked until they have answered twelve drill questions with three quarters of them right. Step 5 shows a padlock on the map until then, and there is no way round it. That is deliberate: the words they drill are the words they are about to use, and ten minutes here is worth more to the essay than ten minutes staring at the paper.
The screen that turns them away never simply says no. It shows how many questions they have answered, what they are scoring, a bar for how near they are, and the one button that goes straight to the drills. A refusal a learner can measure is a task; a refusal they cannot measure is a locked door.
When the drills keep coming out below three quarters, the word list is almost always too hard rather than the learner careless. The gate screen has a button — Change the words I am practising — which asks the app for an easier set of words on the spot; the score usually follows within one round. They may press it as often as they like, and it gets easier each time.
has a button that goes straight there.Note that a piece already begun always reopens, whatever happens to the drill score afterwards. The lock is on starting a piece, never on going back to writing they have already done.
The page is a real A4 sheet, ruled, written on by hand with a pen or a finger, or typed. It is the same writing surface as Wake Write.Draw.Ap, and everything on it is measured in millimetres rather than screen dots, so a line written today lands in exactly the same place on any screen for ever.
The strip along the top says Aim: two pages · about 280 words, worked out from the kind of writing and the learner’s age. Beside it is what they have actually done. Without that, “two pages” means nothing to a ten-year-old.
Tap the clock to start it, tap again to stop. It is set to roughly what an examination paper allows for one composition — about 45 minutes at junior level, an hour at senior — and it turns yellow when the time is up.
Nothing happens when it runs out. It does not close, warn, or take the page away. A clock that locks a child out mid-sentence teaches panic, not writing.
Tap 📋 Plan at the top to see the plan and the word list without leaving the paper. A plan you cannot see while you write is a plan you will not follow.
Both. An examination is handwritten, so handwriting is the honest practice — but a piece being sent to a teacher is easier to read typed. The three dots offer Type it up, which keeps the handwriting exactly as it is and adds a typed copy beside it.
If the device has a real stylus, use it: the app reads pressure from it, and the learner’s hand can rest on the screen while they write. A finger works perfectly well where there is no pen.
The piece is written to the device every few seconds while they write. Step 6 is only about sending it somewhere else, and that is always their choice.
Eight things to read the piece through for: did every sentence end, did every name get a capital, is there a new paragraph for each idea, does it end or simply stop. The learner ticks them off.
This is the closest honest thing to marking that this app can do, and it is where most of the easy marks are. It is deliberately placed before the sending.
For typed work, the device can read the piece out loud. Hearing your own sentence is how you find the full stop you left out — the ear catches what the eye walks past.
WhatsApp, email, print, save as PDF, or save the typed words as a file. Whatever is chosen, the copy on the device stays exactly where it is.
This app names none of them, and that is a decision, not an oversight.
The moment a learner’s work goes into an outside app to be marked, it has left the device and that company keeps a copy of what the child wrote — which is exactly what the Wake apps promise never to do. We cannot see what any of them does with a child’s writing, so we will not put our recommendation behind one.
A grown-up who wants to use one anyway still may. That is your decision to take, knowing what it means. It is not ours to take for you, and it is certainly not one to leave to a ten-year-old.
A person is better anyway. A teacher, an older brother or sister, a parent — anybody who reads English can mark a composition well enough to be useful, and can tell the child why, which is the part that teaches.
When the marked work comes back, the learner writes down what they scored, what it was out of, who marked it, and what that person said. My record book on the home screen charts every mark over time.
Marked by the app — every drill round, put there by the app itself the moment the round ends. The learner cannot change these and neither can anybody else. A drill answer is right or wrong, so a computer can mark it honestly.
Written down by the learner — the essay marks. The learner types them in after a person has marked the writing. This app awards none of these and cannot check any of them. Every screen and every printout says so.
The record book, the report and the printout all keep the two in separate sections and label them. Do not let anybody read a drill score as an essay mark: they measure completely different things.
The app asks the learner out loud to put down what they actually got, whatever it was: a record you can trust is worth more than a record that flatters you, and a record that pretends to be an examination result is not worth having at all.
When you look at it, read the comments rather than the numbers. The same comment appearing twice is the thing to work on next; a mark on its own is not.
At the foot of My record book there are four ways out, and none of them needs a printer:
Whichever you choose, the two kinds of mark stay in their own labelled sections, and the message says in plain words which the app marked and which the learner wrote down. Nothing is sent anywhere by the app itself — you choose who receives it, and you can read every word before it goes.
▲ Back to the contentsHome → Report, behind the grown-up gate. It prints, emails, or goes by WhatsApp.
Whether the writing is any good. The report says how far each essay got, how the drills went, and how much was written. It has no opinion about the composition, and it does not read it. That judgement stays with a person, and the marks in the record book were put there by the learner after a person gave them.
▲ Back to the contentsThere is a free trial to begin with, so you can see the whole eight steps before paying anything. After that the app shows the plans it is sold on, with the price on the screen. Nothing is charged without you choosing a plan and paying for it deliberately.
Payment is handled by Paystack, and the price is decided by our own server rather than by the app on the phone — so a phone cannot be talked into charging itself the wrong amount.
Each Wake app is bought separately. A subscription to this one does not cover any of the others, and theirs do not cover this one. An activation code for another app is politely refused, with a message saying which app it does belong to.
Nothing you have already written is ever taken away. The work stays on your own device and stays yours, whatever happens to a subscription.
▲ Back to the contentsThey will not, and there is no way round it. Read the lesson, then answer twelve drill questions with three quarters of them right. The screen tells you exactly how many are left and what you are scoring.
If the score will not come up, the words are too hard. Press Change the words I am practising on that screen, take out the three longest ones and put three easy ones in. That is the fix nearly every time — see chapter 6.
That is on purpose, and it is not a fault. The model essays are for reading and studying, not for handing in. They cannot be selected, copied, saved or printed, and the learner’s own name is printed faintly across every one. See chapter 2 — including the part about what no app can stop.
Comprehension questions come from a model essay, so one has to be read first. Home → Model essays, choose a topic, choose one of the three, read it, then Answer the questions on this essay. After that the Comprehension drill on the chooser works at any time.
That happens with an unusual topic typed in by hand. The four linking-word lists are always offered and are always worth taking, and anything else can be added by hand in Add a word of your own.
Check the tool along the bottom is Pen and not Rub out or Move. If Only allow a pen is switched on in Settings and a finger is being used, the app says so — switch it off there.
That happens when the device cannot see the pen as a pen. There is no way around it: a device that cannot tell the difference cannot ignore a palm.
Press Bigger. The sheet grows. To move to another part of it, tap ✋ Slide and drag the paper, then tap the pen to write again. Whole page puts it back.
Speaking a word, and reading a piece back, both use a voice built into the device. Some devices have none, and some say a word oddly. It is only ever a help — the meaning is on the screen and the drill works exactly the same without it.
If the voice is hard to make out, open Settings and look for Speaking. You can choose which way of speaking you would like — Ghanaian, British, American, Nigerian or South African — and pick a different voice from the list, pressing Hear this voice to try each one. Not every phone has every accent; when it does not, the app uses the nearest English voice it has. On an iPhone, more voices can be added under Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices.
If the spelling word is said by itself when you would rather it was not, switch off Say each spelling word aloud by itself in the same place. Say it again still works whenever it is pressed.
Handwriting takes a lot of room, and a browser gives an app only a few megabytes. Open My essays → Every page I have written: there is a bar showing how much room is left. Print or send the pieces worth keeping, then delete them — that is what frees the room up. The app warns you well before it runs out.
Make sure the page is open in a real browser (Chrome, or Safari on an iPhone) and not in a preview window inside WhatsApp or Gmail. Those cannot run an app.
▲ Back to the contentsEvery essay, every word list and every page of writing lives in this browser on this device, and nowhere else. Nothing is uploaded to us. That keeps a child’s work private — and it means that clearing your browser, changing phone, or reinstalling will lose the writing itself, which cannot be done again.
Losing a chart is a shame. Losing a term’s compositions is losing the child’s actual work.
Settings → Save a backup writes a file to the device. Email it to yourself and it is safe. It holds the essays, the plans, the word book and the writing itself, so it is a bigger file than the other apps make — that is the point of it. Do this at the end of each term, and before changing phone. To bring it back: Settings → Restore from a backup.
If the learner already exists on the device, the copy holding more work wins — pages first, then essays. Restoring can never quietly lose work.
A printed page or a saved PDF is a copy that no browser can clear. For a piece of work you would be sorry to lose, that is the safest thing you can do with it. The word book and each essay’s word list can be saved as plain files in the same way.
Settings → Clear the record wipes the charts of when and how much was written and keeps every piece of work. Settings → Erase this pupil removes the learner, their essays and their writing completely, and cannot be undone — save a backup first if there is any doubt. If the subscription was bought on that learner, it goes with them.
Wake Comprehension.Essay.Ap · guide for grown-ups · for app version 1.0. One of the Wake learning apps.
▲ Back to the contents