06 Focusing and Organizing

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Start-Up Activity

Print out some excellent examples of landscape photography: a mountain towering above a crystalline lake, a river winding beneath a sunset, waves crashing on a rugged shoreline. Pass the pictures around for your students to look at. Point out that in each picture, the photographer focused on one feature or object, perhaps a twisted tree. The photos have an impact because of this focus.

Tell your students that they need to focus their writing, too, to have the best impact. They need to center their ideas on a single strong thought and build everything around it. This chapter will help them do so. 

Think About It

“A focus statement maps out the route you are planning to travel in your writing.”

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Forming a Focus

Help your students understand that the size of their topic has to match the amount of writing they are doing. A broad topic like "animals" can't be covered well in an essay, let alone a paragraph. A narrow topic such as "this pencil" will be challenging to write about at length.

Use the formula on page 46 to help students narrow a topic to an appropriate focus. Then show the three example focus statements for different writing modes (persuasive, explanatory, and narrative).

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Choosing a Pattern of Organization

Review with your students the five organizational patterns on this page, along with the connecting words they can use. Then check out the related minilessons for graphic organizers and transition words that students can use to help them organize their details according to these patterns.

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Arranging Your Details

Help your students learn the critical organizing strategies on pages 48–50: listing, outlining, and using graphic organizers.

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Outlining

Discuss with your students the difference between a basic list and an outline. An outline goes into greater detail, showing different levels of information. For longer, more complex writing assignments, outlines provide writers more support.

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Using Graphic Organizers

Teach your students how to create and use graphic organizers to put their thoughts in order. Time lines, line diagrams, and Venn diagrams have their own minilessons. You can also find a minilesson with an alternate version of the cause-effect chart as well as a minilesson for creating a pro-con chart.

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