Sometimes students balk at writing more details when they have finished their first drafts. They think they have already included plenty of details when more details would enhance the writing.
To encourage the student to write more details, on a separate piece of paper I rewrite one of the student’s sentences needing more details and suggest we go back and forth–first me, then the student–adding details. Here are some examples.
The student originally writes, “We walked back to the pool.” I add, “In our flipflops and bathing suits,” to the beginning of that sentence. “Well, of course we wore our bathing suits,” says my student, so he crosses out “and our bathing suits.” But he adds, “In our flipflops we walked to the outside pool entrance.”
Another sentence the student originally writes is, “My cousin, Johnny, picked up a glass and cut his fingers.” This time the student starts the additions by adding “soda” to “glass.” I ask which fingers. He crosses out “fingers” and adds “thumb and index finger.” But then without my asking him to, he continues. “My cousin, Johnny, picked up a soda glass and cut his thumb and index fingers. You could see the fat and blood. My uncle drove him in a taxi to the hospital emergency room. My uncle sent a picture to my aunt, showing Johnny doing a pose in his bandage.” What a difference!
Another sentence my student writes is, “We walked to the gift shop.” Before I could add details, he added “to get rocky road ice cream because it was 100 degrees F.”
Why did this exercise work? By pulling the sentences out of the student’s own work and isolating them, it was easy for the student to see the plainness of the sentences. By my offering to write some of the additional phrases, the work seemed more like a game, and he was willing to play along.
Were we working on a computer, we could have swiped the new sentences and replaced the plainer ones, making the work even easier.
English Writing Teacher 