Developing Your Style

This page explains what students need to do to become effective writers and improve their writing style. Review the information, pointing out to students that the strategies are essentially organized by order of importance, starting with the most important ones. As such, stress the importance of reading and writing often. Both habits will help students develop an effective writing style. 

Modeling the Masters (Continued)

Review the samples for modeling sentences and passages. Stress the fact that when students complete sentence modeling, they don’t have to follow the original sentence exactly. The point of modeling is simply to write new sentences that generally flow in the same way. Model the process with a few sentences of your own. Then have students try modeling the sentences below or ones of your own choosing.

• The last time I saw Grandpa was a year ago on his 60th wedding anniversary.
• I talked to Sylvia Conroe, a resident at a retirement home.
• As we moved farther along, I could see my house fading away.

Using Strong, Colorful Words (Continued)

Review how to choose words with the right connotation and how to choose effective modifiers. For some of your students, especially English Language Learners, addressing the connotation of words may be a bit of a stretch, because of their limited vocabulary. This may be a good time to introduce or review the use of a thesaurus with your students. (See page 317 in All Write.)

Also be sure to discuss the tip about overusing adjectives that carry very little meaning. For practice, have students offer specific alternatives for each of these adjectives, perhaps with the help of a thesaurus:

• neat, big, pretty, small, cute, fun, bad, nice, good, dumb, great, funny

Display a master list of alternatives in the classroom.