Share your writing with students to improve yours and theirs

Posted on December 5, 2016 | Leave a comment

A couple of months ago I shared the first scene from a story I am writing with two of my students, an eighth grade brother and a sixth grade sister.

Teacher typing on a laptop seated between a young boy and a young girl.

Their feedback was insightful:  how I started off in the middle of a tense situation, how my short sentences made that tense situation even tenser, how they liked the tenderness of the main character, how shocked they were by something that happened just like the main character must have been, and how real the dialog of the children sounded.

I had previously taught them that writers today are encouraged not to provide back story at the beginning of a narrative, but rather to jump right into the action and weave the backstory in here and there.

“Oh, now I see what you mean,” said the brother.  “You have the mother trying to stop the car, and the 18-wheeler zooming up behind her, and the pickup ahead of her zig-zagging and trapping her.”

“Yeah, and only then you learn there are children in the back seat who are yelling because they’re scared,” said the sister.

“But you don’t tell anything about them except their names.”

“Yeah, but you still care about them because they’re kids and they’re scared.”

From this short exchange, I was reminded how useful it is for the writing teacher / tutor / parent to share her own writing with a student.

  • Sharing your writing proves that you know how to write, so your praise and criticism are respected by your students.
  • Sharing your writing makes the lesson more collaborative. The students give feedback, ask questions and suggest areas that could be improved, adopting the role usually reserved for the teacher.  The teacher, meanwhile, learns how to improve her writing.
  • Demonstrating the kind of behavior you hope your students will show, such as listening carefully to what they say, adding more information when they say that an idea is vague, and drawing arrows to move ideas around for better sequencing, will lead to the same good writing behaviors in your students.
  • Taking the students’ suggestions seriously models life-long learning, a lifestyle we hope they will adopt.
  • And perhaps most importantly, showing that you do what you are asking them to do builds their respect for you as their teacher.

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Posted in dialog in writing, Introductions, motivating writers, narrative writing, revising first drafts, writing tips

Copying sentence patterns can lead to good writing

Posted on November 28, 2016 | Leave a comment

For the most part, sentence structure should be invisible, like the skeleton of a person.  It’s the message that the sentences tell, not the structure of the sentences, that we should focus on when reading.

girl writing and thinkingMost children write sentences in predictable similar patterns:  a subject followed by a predicate connected by a coordinating conjunction to another subject and predicate.  If there are prepositional phrases, they go at the end.  My dog ran, so I chased him up the street.

How to shake up the monotony of children’s sentences is challenging.  One way to do this is to have students copy sentence patterns while using their own words.

For example, see how the sentences below, taken from an article on Neptune*, can be used to write a paragraph about Disney World.

Dark, cold and whipped by supersonic winds, Neptune is the last of the hydrogen and helium gas giants in our solar system.

Bright, crowded and filled with happy children, Disney World is my favorite place in the warm and sunny southern state of Florida.

It is invisible to the naked eye because of its extreme distance from Earth.

It is visited by millions because of its big airport in Orlando.

Neptune’s atmosphere extends to great depths, gradually merging into water and other melted ices.

Disney World’s crowds come from far away, even traveling from Brazil and other South American countries.

In 1989, Voyager 2 tracked a large, oval-shaped, dark storm in Neptune’s southern hemisphere, a “Great Dark Spot” that was large enough to contain the entire Earth.

In 2016 I visited the tall, white-painted building in the Magic Kingdom’s heart, “Cinderella’s Castle” that was big enough to contain my whole fourth grade.

Triton is extremely cold.

Disney World is really wonderful.

With first or second graders, I choose sentence patterns that are short and easy to duplicate.  If I am teaching parts of speech, I might combine a writing lesson with a grammar lesson.  I model how to write sentences using other sentences as patterns before I ask students to try writing on their own.

With older students, we might discuss the various ways the sentences begin (in the examples above, with adjectives, a pronoun, a possessive noun, a prepositional phrase and a noun).  We might count words and discuss how differing lengths add variety (22, 14, 14, 28 and 4 above).  We analyze whether sentences are simple, compound or complex.  (Four of the examples above are simple and one is complex.)

If students keep a writing notebook, one section could be a collection of sentences they have patterned.  Later, when they are writing, I encourage them to use their notebook fo sentence structure ideas.

Modeling new sentences on given sentence patterns can be a useful writing homework assignment.

* NASA.gov, adapted by Newsela staff, https://newsela.com/articles/lib-nasa-neptune-overview/id/22033/

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Posted in grammar, motivating writers, practice writing skills, sentence modeling, sentence structure, writing tips

Is it okay to use bullets in academic writing? My kid’s seventh grade teacher forbids it.

Posted on November 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

That’s too bad because research shows that bulleted items are well-read.

  • Perhaps it is the white space preceding a bullet or following the bulleted item that draws the eye. White space is known to make writing look friendlier and less intimidating.
  • Or perhaps it is the brevity of most bulleted items that lures the reader.
  • It could also be the obvious organization that bullets imply.

Using bullets (called glyphs) is common in business and technical writing.  Bulleted items can be lists of words, sentences or paragraphs.  Go online and you can find many sites that offer advice on how to use bullets.

More recently bullets have become accepted in academic writing, but to be sure, check the style manual a discipline or teacher recommends.

This is a fifth grader's organizer for a story she wrote about meeting Harry Potter.

This is a fifth grader’s organizer for a story she wrote about meeting Harry Potter.

I checked the SAT website to see if bulleted items are allowed on the new SAT essay, but I couldn’t find an answer.  However, the rules explaining the new essay used several sets of bulleted items.

When doing power point presentations, students should use bullets in their slides, not sentences.  For example

Bears eat

  • berries
  • honey from bee hives
  • bird seed from bird feeders
  • fish

Students create Power Point projects all the time.  They need to learn this useful skill.  On science project presentations and on posters, bullets are more apt than paragraphs and are better read.

At your next teacher meeting you might ask your son’s teacher why she doesn’t allow bullets.  She might think that bullets are not formal enough for academic writing.  Wrong.  Or she might think that some students would turn in a laundry list of bullets rather than write fully developed paragraphs.  Right.  She would be better off teaching the proper use of bullets than forbidding them entirely since eventually almost all students use them.

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Posted in PowerPoint presentations, research on writing, writing rules, writing tips

Use a diagram to “see” the structure of the new SAT essay

Posted on November 14, 2016 | Leave a comment

When working with students learning how to write an essay for the new SAT exam, I draw diagrams of an essay pattern they can follow. The diagram acts as a prewriting organizer.  It shows students an overall perspective of what they must write.  Here is a diagram that is easy to follow yet leads to an effective SAT essay.

diagram-of-sat-essayThis diagram separates the persuasive techniques from the summary.  In the SAT workbooks, the best essay samples entwine the summary and the persuasive techniques, a more sophisticated pattern to follow.

What is important is to cover all three of the criteria which will be judged:  1) clearly showing that you understand what the essay prompt is all about (the summary), 2) recognizing and analyzing persuasive techniques, and 3) doing all this using excellent English (perfect  grammar, a variety of sentence patterns, advanced vocabulary and–most difficult of all–your own voice).

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Posted in clarity, essay introduction, grammar, hooks, Introductions, persuasive essay, practice writing skills, prewriting organizer, SAT, SAT essay, sentence structure, summarizing, writing tips

Is there an ideal election ballot?

Posted on November 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

Is there an ideal election ballot, one written and designed clearly so that it is easy to read and use?

Yes.  It has ten features.*

2016-election-ballot

  • The ballot uses mostly lower case letters. Why? ALL UPPERCASE LETTERS ARE HARDER TO READ compared to lower case letters.
  • The names on the ballot, instructions, and other words are aligned to the left, not centered. With left-aligned type, it is easy for the eye to find where the next line begins.  With center-aligned type, the eye has to work to figure out which is the next line.
  • Font size matters. For ballots on a touch screen computer, type should be at least 25 point.  For optically scanned ballots, type should be at least 12 point.  Voters should not need magnifying glasses in order to read the ballot.
  • Fonts should be sans-serif (a lettering style without those little tabs at the tops or bottoms of letters). Sans-serif type faces are cleaner and therefore quicker to read than serif styles.
  • Optically scanned ballots should have instructions at the beginning and page numbers on every page. Touchscreens should offer continuous instructions (for example, at the top of each screen), language options, and a navigation system which is identical on every page of the ballot.
  • Instructions should be presented in simple, easy-to-understand English (or other language). So should ballot initiatives, changes to constitutions, and proposed changes to tax law.  Sample ballots should be available at polling stations so that voters can read complete written instructions and law changes before entering the polling booth.
  • Visual instructions, such as an arrow indicating to turn the page at the bottom of a touchscreen ballot, should be obvious and consistent.
  • Only informational icons, such as a stop sign at the end of the ballot, should be used—no elephants or donkeys.
  • Color, boldfacing or boxing should be used consistently. For example, if instructions are in color or in a shaded box on page one, they should appear the same way throughout the ballot.  However, color cannot be the only way to call attention to important information.
  • Layout and text size should be used to indicate importance of information. For example, on the page of Presidential candidates, the words indicating a vote for President should be bigger and more obvious than the names of candidates.  The candidates’ names should be bigger and more obvious than their party affiliation.  Also, all candidates’ names should be presented equally in font size and darkness of font.

* Design for Democracy, a strategic initiative of AIGA, the professional association for design, developed these guidelines.  AIGA worked with the US Election Assistance Commission and did testing on potential voters to develop these guidelines.  Because holding elections is a function of the states and not the federal government, each state is free to create its own ballots according to its own criteria.  After the election of 2000, many states changed their ballots to make them clearer, easier to use and less likely to be challenged.

 

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Posted in clarity, election ballot criteria, research on writing