Add details to improve the number of words per sentence and to improve sentence structure.

Posted on December 11, 2014 | Leave a comment

Adding more details has the effect of adding more words to an essay. More importantly, it changes a general, humdrum essay into a specific, interesting essay. If the number of sentences stays the same, then the number of words per sentence increases, usually a good outcome for children who tend to write tiny sentences.Add Details graphicUntil they work with me, many students think that adding more details means adding more adjectives. Not so. When I say details, here is what I mean:

  • Proper nouns—Give names to common nouns already in the essay, or add names.
  • Numbers—Use specific amounts of items, not “some” or “a lot.”
  • Dates, time of day, time of year, year, season
  • Sensory details—Identify and describe smells, sounds, tastes, textures, and sights.
  • Sizes, shapes, colors, amounts.
  • Thoughts and opinions of the characters or the writer, if appropriate
  • Dialog—Let the reader hear characters talking instead of using indirect quotes.
  • Feelings of a character, including the narrator. These are often overlooked, yet it is through feelings that readers connect with characters.
  • Similes, metaphors, hyperbole and other figures of speech.
  • Examples—probably the most important kind of details.

One way to shake up an older student’s writing is to ask him to add each of these kinds of details (if appropriate) to a single essay. Or pick a number—five, for example—and let the student choose which kind of details to use. Some details are easier for the student to add by herself; others will take teacher modeling.
More on each of these kinds of details in the next blog.

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What is the right age to start a child writing essays? Is first grade too young?

Posted on December 3, 2014 | Leave a comment

3rd grader writing an essay.For 20 years I have tutored children in how to write. Only one rising first grader and two children already in first grade were ready to write essays. Essays require thoughtful organization for which most first graders don’t have the patience or organizational skills. They want to jump right in without planning.

What qualities do I look for in students ready to write essays?

  • Children who already write long narratives—the fronts and backs of notebook paper. Sometimes this is the sign of a gifted child who is more advanced than her peers in writing skills.
  • Children who can read at a third grade level or better. Through their reading, these children have encountered lots of writing which subconsciously will influence their style, vocabulary and topics.
  • Children with strong vocabulary skills. During a writing class, students will hear new words, or will hear words used in new ways. Liking to work with words is a sign that students are ready for essay writing.
  • Children who can spell well (not perfectly) with more correct spelling than phonetic spelling. A writing lesson is not a spelling lesson.
  • Children who speak English well, using words and grammar correctly. Writing lessons include fixing up grammar errors, but in general, the student’s command of English grammar and usage should be good. A writing lesson is not a grammar lesson.
  • Children who can focus for up to an hour. Many skills come together during writing classes—holding a pencil, forming letters and words, organizing thoughts, spelling, finding synonyms in a thesaurus, listening to a teacher’s instructions, sitting (or standing) for most of an hour, and asking questions. Writing is a process, not a single skill, and parts of the process are best worked on while the ideas are flowing, so the child needs to be able to hang in there.
  • Children willing to take direction. I have taught talented first graders who had all the above qualities but they were not willing to listen to my suggestions or to follow my directions. Children need maturity to begin essay writing.

Third grade is a good time to start essay writing for some children. For others, fourth grade is better. During kindergarten, first and second grade, students can focus on writing sentences or paragraphs. They can also learn from reading with an adult. You can point out to your child why a certain sentence sounds good, or how a writer gets the child’s attention. You can point out how a certain character in a book sounds like a child because of the words she uses or the way she uses them, while an adult sounds differently.

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Combine sentences to improve the number of words per sentence and to improve sentence structure.

Posted on November 21, 2014 | Leave a comment

In addition to eliminating sentences, combining two or more sentences usually reduces the number of total words in an essay; it also reduces the number of sentences. This causes the number of words per sentence to rise slightly.

I ask students to combine sentences without using “and,” “but,” and “so” to avoid adding more compound sentences to the essay. Students can easily combine sentences, but they cannot easily combine them without using coordinating conjunctions. I work with students on using subordinate conjunctions, relative pronouns, and gerund and participle phrases.

Combining sentences in an essay by a six grader.

Here are revisions that combine sentences about a swim meet by a sixth grader:

Students start by figuring out the number of words in each sentence and writing those numbers in the margins of their essays next to the sentences. Students look for small numbers indicating short sentences. Usually, but not always, the short sentences need to be next to each other in order to combine them. Always they need to be in the same paragraph.

When the student finds a short sentence, he reads nearby sentences to see if the two sentences can be combined. Not all neighboring sentences can be combined. They need to be close in topic, or show some kind of relationship—a cause and effect, a sequence, or a dialog by the same person, for example. If the sentences seem related, the students and I discuss how they could be combined. Beginning writing students almost always suggest “and,” “but” and “so,” since these are the connecting words they normally use (and the words their school teachers suggest).

When I suggest alternatives, I need to keep in mind what will sound normal to a student of a particular age. What improvements I can suggest to a younger student, or to an ESL student are often more limited than what I can suggest to an older or more widely read student.

“Sometimes my little sister asks a silly question. I say a silly answer and she laughs at me.” How can these eight and ten-word sentences, respectively, be combined? I might suggest adding the word “when” after the word “sometimes.” “Sometimes when my little sister asks a silly question, I say a silly answer and she laughs at me.” For a younger student, combining a simple sentence with a compound sentence to form a complex-compound sentence is a big improvement in sentence structure. It also produces a 19-word sentence that sounds normal to a third grader’s ear.

How about this example? “First, snowball fighting. We had the fight in our front yard. I was the one who made perfectly round snowballs.” The third-grader who wrote this fragment followed by two tiny sentences changed them to “First, my brothers and I had a snowball fight in our front yard where I made perfectly round snowballs.”

In our next blog we’ll talk about another way to revise sentences: adding more details in order to increase the number of words per sentence and to improve sentence structure.

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Posted in complex sentence, compound sentence, revising sentence length

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Find the number of words per sentence, and then increase that number

Posted on November 5, 2014 | Leave a comment

First, why is having more words in a sentence important?

  • Little children write little sentences. Their writing sounds childish in part because each sentence is so short and contains only one idea.  (I have a dog.  His name is Rex.  Rex barks.)  By writing longer sentences, children increase the sophistication of their writing.  (My dog, a tan boxer, barks at other dogs.)
  • Tiny sentences are almost always simple sentences. As children grow, they are taught in school to add conjunctions to form compound sentences.  Unfortunately, these string-along sentences continue to sound childish.  (I have a dog and his name is Rex and Rex barks.)  Children need practice in forming longer sentences without relying on “and,” “but” and “so.”
  • When children write longer sentences, the sentence grammar changes from short simple sentences and string-along compound sentences to more adult-like sentence structures—complicated simple sentences and complex sentences. This change is the real reason I have students count words in sentences and is more important than the actual number of words per sentence.  But children need proof that change is necessary, and counting the number of words offers that.  By their own calculations, children see that they are writing too many short sentences.

Word count before and after revising the sentences.I begin by offering students a calculator.  Using a calculator in a writing lesson surprises students, yet they relish using it.  (However, because revising verbs and sentence openings often changes the number of words per sentence, this activity should wait until early revising activities are done.  Many students will want to do this as soon as they finish their first draft.  Restrain them until they have done the harder revising of verbs and sentence openings.)

Next, I ask students to count the number of words in each sentence and to record the number in the margin near the sentence (not within the copy itself or the number will become lost in a well revised essay).  I encourage students to write the number with a colored pencil so the number will be easy to find later.  Some students think I mean the number of words per line, so I usually count the number of words in the first few sentences with them, watching, so they get the idea.  Even then, I point out that I am counting sentences, not the number of words on a line.

After all the words are counted, I ask students to add up the total number of words (that is, to add up all the margin numbers they have just written down).  Then they add up the total number of sentences, either by counting the number of first words circled (not such a good idea since those words often change) or by counting the number of numbers in the margin (easy if the numbers are in colored ink).

Now the student uses a calculator to divide the total number of words by the total number of sentences, to find the average (mean) number of words per sentence.

Because little children tend to write little sentences, and adults tend to write longer sentences, I give every student a target number of words per sentence based on grade level.  For third graders it is 13; for fourth graders, 14; for fifth graders, 15.  I set a target of more than 15 for middle schoolers, and the high teens for high school students and older.

Granted, these numbers are arbitrary.  But they are easy for students to remember and they serve the purpose of making students work to increase the number of words per sentence.  Rarely do I teach a beginning student who matches the target number in his writing without revising.  But with revising, the number always increases.

A few exceptions:

  • Students who use dialog will have shorter sentences because people usually speak in shorter sentences. Try calculating just the sentences without dialog.  I have had some students try to eliminate dialog to increase the number of words per sentence.  No!  The dialog sparkles the writing and needs to stay.
  • What if children use interjections like “Wow!” or “Holy cow!” Should they be counted as a sentence?    Ignore them.

How do children increase the number of words per sentence?  We will look at that in the next blog.

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Analyzing simple, compound, complex and compound/complex sentences can improve writing

Posted on October 27, 2014 | Leave a comment
four declarative sentence types

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Most writing is done in declarative sentences.  But those declarative sentences can be broken down into four types:  simple, compound, complex and compound-complex.  Good writers use all four types.

With older students who know what simple, compound, complex and compound-complex sentences are, I ask them to identify each sentence in an essay.  I don’t do this for every essay, but occasionally it offers a student insight into his own writing.  It also suggests sentence types that are overused or not used enough.

Using the four kinds of sentences, the student identifies every sentence in his essay using tally marks.  Then we look at the results.

  • Students who have a majority of simple sentences might be writing (and thinking) too simply if the sentences are mostly short and uncomplicated. An abundance of clear yet, complicated simple sentences, on the other hand, shows a writer mastering sentence construction.

    • What is a complicated simple sentence? It might start with a phrase—a gerund phrase, an infinitive phrase or a prepositional phrase.  It might add a compound subject or predicate and include a direct object or predicate adjective.  It might delight with details such as appositives.  Words might be out of the typical order.  There is no one formula.
  • Students who have a majority of complex sentences might be writing in too complicated a manner, especially if the average number of words per sentence (we’ll discuss this in a future blog) is more than 20. A high mix of complicated simple sentences and complex sentences, with a few short simple sentences thrown in, almost like spices in a recipe, usually results in attractive writing.

    • Some students use complex sentences well but nearly always begin those sentences with the independent clauses. Turning some of those sentences around—starting with the subordinate conjunction—adds sentence variety without much effort.
  • Overuse of compound sentences can make a student’s writing sound childlike. So can overusing a single subject and a compound predicate.  If a student is aware that he tends to prefer these kinds of sentence formations, he can make changes as he writes or even before he writes a sentence.

    • Ask students who overuse compound sentences to circle all the “and,” “but” and “so” words in their sentences. Now ask them to relate the same ideas without using “and,” “but” or “so.”  Students are forced to imagine different sentence structures.
  • Compound-complex sentences generally are long. Occasionally, such sentences are fine, but a high mix of them usually makes for difficult reading.

    • Some compound-complex sentences are rambling, wordy sentences which should be cut into parts both for clarity and sophistication. Encourage the student to replace this kind of sentence with a complicated simple sentence and / or a complex sentence, not with a compound sentence.

We’ll discuss each of these sentence types in more detail in future blogs, but for now, let’s move on to my students’ favorite writing activity: math!

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Posted in complex sentence, compound sentence, compound-complex sentence, declarative sentence, simple sentence

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