Category Archives: English Writing Instruction

Writing well takes study and practice.

Should you write with a long word when a good short word is available?

Posted on November 25, 2015 | 1 comment

Research shows you should choose the short word.

Nine years ago, a teacher at Stanford University had 71 students read several writing samples and then rank them. Some of the samples were “doctored” to replace simple nouns, verbs and adjectives with more complex words. The result: students rated the authors of the complex vocabulary samples as stupid.

happy pencilConcludes the author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, “Write as simply and plainly as possible and it’s more likely you’ll be thought of as intelligent.”

Stan Berry, coauthor of five books on writing, agrees. He says readers will stop reading when they are confused. To keep your writing clear, he advises using short, simple words.

Robert Frost, maybe the most renowned US poet, advised to use words of Anglo-Saxon origin for both simplicity and clarity. If you read his poems, you’ll rarely find long words or words of Latin origin. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” for example, Frost uses only one three-syllable word, “promises.” The rest are mostly one-syllable words, and all are every-day words a child could understand.

So how do you select a good word? Ask yourself:

  • Is the word’s meaning clear and specific? If so, use it. If not, keep searching.
  • Does that word fit with the other words you are using?  Does it sound like it belongs, like it is the most natural way to say what you want to say?   If it sounds wrong (too formal, too intellectual, or too childish), don’t use it. Choose another.
  • Does that word stand out? Sometimes that’s good, but sometimes a highfalutin word can sound awkward amid simpler words. Keep searching.
  • Lastly, if you’re not sure about a word, and you keep going back to it, replace it.

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Posted in clarity, English Writing Instruction, short words, verb choice, vocabulary building

For young writers, create small lists of synonyms to replace overused words

Posted on November 8, 2015 | Leave a comment

When students are too young to use a thesaurus, they still should be encouraged to find synonyms for words they rely on all the time, such as “see,” “nice,” “thing,” “go” and “a lot.”

student thinking about what to writeOne way to do this is to collect synonyms for words children overuse, and make a booklet of them which children can refer to when they are writing. Such word lists are readily available on the internet. If you search for “words kids overuse in writing,” you’ll find many websites listing synonyms which you can download.

Recently I was working with a second grader whose first grade teacher had made an eight-page booklet of synonyms. My student was about to use “biggest” to describe an a pumpkin patch when I asked her to consider synonyms. She consulted her word bank and chose “massive” instead.

Unless words are used as parts of idioms, or are versions of the verb “to be,” they can usually be replaced with more specific words with little rewriting.

If you know students will be writing about an upcoming event, you can prepare a page of substitute words. For Halloween, the word “ghost” could be replaced with specter, spirit, demon, spook, phantom, shadow or apparition. At Thanksgiving, the word “turkey” could be replaced with poultry, fowl, rooster or bird. In the winter, “snow” could be replaced with flurries, blizzard, squall, crystals, flakes, powder and dust.

Replacing weak or overused vocabulary words with fresh, specific ones, especially verbs, is one of the best ways to improve writing.

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Posted in English Writing Instruction, vocabulary building

Try journal writing with your child to improve mechanics, grammar and vocabulary

Posted on October 25, 2015 | Leave a comment

Many teachers ask their students to write in journals daily for a few minutes. Often it is at the start of the writing lesson, while the teacher readies herself for the lesson.

But journal writing needn’t be restricted to the classroom. Journal writing during homework time can achieve many of the same results as writing during the school day.

  • boy writing on a window benchStudents can improve the mechanics of their writing. Capitalization, punctuation, use of apostrophes, use of quotation marks—all can improve through regular journal writing. When the child has completed her five or ten minutes of journal writing, the parent can remind the child to check if her sentences begin with capitals or if she has remembered to spell there/their/they’re correctly. This reminder can be given for a week, and then the next week the reminder can be about another aspect of writing which the child is learning.
  • By writing daily in a journal, the child can gain confidence using certain kinds of writing, such as dialog, extended sentences, or prepositional phrases. Before the child begins her journal writing homework, the parent could say that she wants the child to begin each sentence with a prepositional phrase or to include dialog in her writing. Later, the parent could ask the child to check that the end-of-sentence period is inside the quotation marks.
  • child writing in sleeping bagIf the child allows the parent to read the journal, the child could be encouraged to write a question mark or even a question to the parent asking about something she has tried to write. For example, the child might have tried to use a new vocabulary word, and might want to know if she used it correctly or spelled it correctly. The parent could write a note in the journal to let her know if she succeeded, establishing a dialog between a beginning writer and a more experienced writer.
  • In her journal, the child might relate a private thought which she might not have the confidence to say aloud. She might write about a bullying situation or a curse word used by a classmate. Journals can open discussions about sensitive issues.
  • Sometimes the parent might suggest an open-ended sentence to write about. “If I saw my brother doing something unsafe, like ________, I would. . .” or “The reason I don’t like ________  is because . . .”

To encourage a child to write in a journal, the parent might say that she is going to write in a journal at the same time. The parent might read aloud her journal entry or might say, “Not tonight,” providing the child with permission not to share her writing. Or the parent might give the child her journal entry to read aloud or privately.

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Posted in English Writing Instruction

Writing summaries of nonfiction

Posted on July 21, 2015 | Leave a comment

By middle school, today’s students are required to write summaries even though a generation ago this kind of writing began in high school. The Common Core promotes this kind of writing, as does students’ need to be able to write research papers at younger ages than in the past.

Summaries are written for many reasons:

  • Notetaking (listening to a lecture and discerning the important parts, or reading research and paraphrasing the important parts),
  • Understanding a reading passage (rewriting the main ideas to better understand them), and
  • Identifying the main points (turning an outline into a paragraph or two, or gathering information to use for later studying).

Students encounter two problems over and over when writing summaries:

  • How long should a summary be?
  • How much detail should be included in a summary?

Unfortunately, there are no clear-cut answers to either question, but here’s what I tell my middle grade students about summarizing nonfiction reading selections:

  • First, read the whole reading selection so you know what it is about and so you can judge what is important and what is not. If you don’t understand the selection, this is the time to ask questions.
  • If a reading selection has eight paragraphs, then (for middle grade students) its summary should have about eight sentences. Summaries are concise versions of the original, with major ideas included and most supporting details eliminated.
  • However, if the first paragraph or paragraphs are there only to hook the reader, then their ideas should not be included in the summary.
  • If a paragraph is a single sentence, perhaps it can be combined with another sentence in the summary. Or perhaps it is not important.
  • If a paragraph is more than five sentences, or if it contains a series of important ideas, then more than one sentence should be written to summarize it.
  • At the beginning, even before the topic sentence, the student should name the piece of writing being summarized and its author, and any particular ideas that would be helpful to the reader. The student writer should let the reader know that he is reading a summary. Sometimes this information can be included with the topic sentence.
  • Even though a summary is not an essay, a topic sentence is essential to help the reader to understand the summary.
  • A conclusion is sometimes not necessary if it would summarize the summary.
  • A good summary should be complete; that is, it should include all the important information in the original. If an author spends five paragraphs on subtopic A but only one paragraph on subtopic B, then the summary should include more information about subtopic A (about five times more) than subtopic B.
  • If the original text shows a point of view on a topic, that point of view should be replicated in the summary (letting the reader know that the point of view is that of the original author).
  • If the original text is factual and objective, so should be the summary.
  • The student writing the summary should not include his own perspective on the topic. Sometimes this happens unconsciously, for example, by using the word “only.”

How to write a summary or a nonfiction reading selection:

  • When I am teaching summaries to a student, I ask the student to write the main idea of each paragraph being read in the margin next to that paragraph or on a post-it note pasted next to the paragraph.  If the reading selection contains chapters, then I ask the student to write the main ideas of the chapter at the beginning of that chapter.
  • After each paragraph’s (or chapter’s) main idea is identified, the student needs to read all those margin notes and ask himself how they relate to the whole. Why did the author include each of those ideas in his passage? From that musing by the student often comes the topic sentence of the summary. That sentence is the most important one, from which all the others flow.
  • Information in a summary should be paraphrased. Occasionally, quotation marks can show the original words of the author being summarized, but direct quotes should be the exception, not the rule.
  • Summaries are usually written in the present tense.
  • If the summary is more than five sentences, remind the reader that this is a summary by using words like, “as author so-and-so says,” or “as article such-and-such relates.” If the summary is several paragraphs, a reminder to the reader that he is reading a summary should be included in each paragraph.

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Posted in English Writing Instruction, Including details in writing, paraphrasing, summarizing

How do you paraphrase?

Posted on July 15, 2015 | Leave a comment

In the 21st century, middle school students are writing research papers, so they need to know how to paraphrase. Quoting word-for-word is no longer the preferred way to present information in a research paper; paraphrasing is.

So what is paraphrasing? Paraphrasing is saying what someone else said (or wrote) using your own vocabulary and grammar. Paraphrasing turns antiquated writing into easy-to-understand modern writing; paraphrasing captures the essence of a writer’s ideas while ignoring his boring language; paraphrasing avoids plagiarism.

Paraphrasing is not the same as summarizing. In a paraphrase, the writer tries to capture all the important details of the original; in a summary, the writer leaves out most of those details.

How does a student paraphrase?

  • First, read the selection to be paraphrased. If you don’t understand every word and idea, read it again, look up words and ask for help. You can’t paraphrase what you don’t understand.
  • Carefully study the first sentence. Put it in your own words, being careful to use different vocabulary.   In particular, change the verbs if you can, using specific synonyms.
  • Now change the grammar. Try changing the order of the parts of the sentence so the ideas are the same, but they are not stated within a sentence in the same order.
  • Of course, you will need to use some of the same words in the original for which there are no synonyms, or for which alternatives would be cumbersome. If you are paraphrasing rules about how to play soccer, for example, you would need to use “soccer,” “ball,” “goal, “field” “play” and many other soccer-specific words.
  • Move through the selection one sentence at a time. As you get more experience, you can paraphrase ideas rather than sentences, combining ideas in several sentences in the original into one sentence in the paraphrase.  Or you can cut long, verbose sentences in the original into two or more shorter sentences in the paraphrase.
  • Paraphrases don’t need to be exactly the same length as the original, but all the important ideas in the original need to be stated in the paraphrase.
  • Read over your paraphrase to be sure it is clear to the reader.

Notice the difference between the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence and a paraphrased version:

The original words:   “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

A paraphrase: Sometimes, one group of people who have been politically connected to another group of people decide it’s necessary to go their separate ways and to become a new country. Out of respect for everyone involved, it’s a good idea for the country which is separating to explain the reasons why the break is necessary.

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Posted in clarity, English Writing Instruction, grammar, paraphrasing, summarizing