Reading and writing are unnatural acts. They are taught skills, not an inevitable result of maturation. If taught properly, the result is literacy. If taught improperly, the result is semi-literacy.
It’s hard to fail when you teach reading because it’s mostly teaching the correspondence of sight and sound. The hardest part is dealing with silent letters and letters that make multiple sounds. English is replete with these nuisances, but they’re nothing flash cards can’t fix.
Writing is altogether another matter. Writing is an act of building. When done, writers have a construction to show for their effort. It may sound easy, but it’s incredibly painstaking. Teaching writing isn’t just teaching carpentry; it’s teaching architecture.
This post is for writing teachers. The ideas I’ll offer will work only if all the writing teachers in a school system agree to four premises:
1. Writing is a act of building.
2. Writing must be continually presented as building to students.
3. Writing must be taught in prescribed, graduated lessons.
4. Grammar and punctuation should be taught only in the context of a writing construction. They are derivative subjects and never the focal point of a writing lesson.
If there is no consensus about these premises, Johnny will have to settle for semi-literacy.
The sizes of constructions
A writing construction might be one word: Silence. A sentence fragment: (which that was). A simple transitive sentence: Joanie loves Chachi. A simple intransitive sentence: I gotta lie down. And an enormous variety of other sentence types —interrogative, imperative, hypothetical, compound, complex, compound-complex — until, at the outer limits of the craft, you reach this monstrosity: 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.
Beyond this, there are the long forms of writing: essays, speech writing, reportage, biography, textbooks, narrative fiction (short stories and novels), play writing, and the many genres of poetry. Each of these is an architectural study unto itself. For the purposes of grade school instruction, it suffices to teach the forms I’ve italicized.
Word roles
Teaching should progress from the smallest building block to the largest. That means starting with words, but from unfamiliar perspectives. Students know that words differ by spelling and meaning, but they’re not aware that words differ by role. To say or write something meaningful, words with different roles have to come together according to a set of rules. Scream my sometimes sister me makes is incomprehensible. The word order (syntax) is a mess. But the necessary roles (parts of speech) are present, so something can be made of this hash.
Ask students to group lists of common words by role, and then choose words from the role groups to form partial and complete sentences. You’ll have to start each of these tasks and interact continually.
Keep your introduction to verbs simple by dealing only the present and past tenses, the active voice, and transitive versus intransitive constructions. Handle conjunctions similarly by discussing only those in the FANBOYS mnemonic (the coordinating conjunctions). A deeper dive into verbs and conjunctions will come later.
Word music
From our lips and in our heads, words make music. Just say or think the word melodious, and you know this to be true. Moreover, words have rhythm. Every multisyllabic word has an emphatic syllable. If you string words together to produce a pattern of emphasis, you create a rhythm: But soft! What light from yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun.
Rhyming is the most common form of word music. When a a rhyme is sounded, ears and minds take notice, but it isn’t necessary to rhyme to catch someone’s notice. Merely repeating consonant sounds (alliteration) does the job: Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary. So does repeating vowel sounds (assonance): Hear the mellow wedding bells. Poe finishes this thought with a flourish — more assonance, alliteration, and a rhyme: Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Word power
Students need to learn that words vary in power. This is especially true among verbs. Take, for example, Jack showed Paula his magic tricks versus Jack dazzled Paula with his magic tricks. If Jack really dazzled Paula, the writer should say so. Dazzle has much more descriptive power than show.
Adjectives also have power. Consider these sentences:
The cat followed Amy home.
The dirty cat followed Amy home.
The grungy cat followed Amy home.
The first is the dullest; it doesn’t describe the cat at all. The second fixes that problem, but the third is more vivid. Writers should prefer vivid.
Using words figuratively
When writers write figuratively, they provoke their readers’ imagination and summon them into the text. They can do this by making surprising but apt comparisons and by calling out their readers’ senses. Here are three common methods:
Imagery: The cat’s approach was so near that Amy feared she’d trip. We can visualize their awkward progress.
Simile: The cat was as smelly as an open garbage can. The comparison works like a powerful adverb that puts the cat in our noses.
Metaphor: From a distance, you’d swear a small compost heap was stalking Amy. Here, the cat is associated with a bizarre image.
You’ll want to discuss many more examples of these methods and expose your students to less common methods as well. I suggest dividing students into teams and asking each team for a presentation on a different assigned method. Their presentations should include at least four examples.
Building word groups
When students begin putting words into groups, help them discover the three results compatible with written communication: phrases, dependent clauses, and independent clauses, also known as sentences.
Be careful not to label stand-alone sentence fragments — phrases and dependent clauses — as writing errors. People say a sentence can “stand by itself” but a fragment can’t. True, but this merely means a sentence, unlike a fragment, can be taken out of context and still be understood. That difference is a trifle. Put a fragment in context with sentences, and it’s perfectly understandable.
The message here is that language puts a rich variety of materials and techniques at the command of writer-builders. Nothing stands between them and creating their own voices.
Phrases
A phrase is a group of words that do what an adjective does, what an adverb does, or what a noun does. It’s much like a clause but does not contain a verb. Examples:
Adjective phrase: Frank always wore a T-shirt with a skull on it.
Adverb phrase: I could think only of Tammy Parker and her lustrous brown hair.
Noun phrase: Nathan, the class clown, was at home with the chicken pox.
Your task is to show many more examples and discuss how the phrase in each functions as an adjective, adverb, or noun. Then ask your students to create a dozen or more sentences containing the various phrase types. Each phrase should be underscored and labeled. Let the class comment on the results in an open discussion.
Note: Whenever you give students “proof of understanding” homework, ask them to write examples of their own. Never ask them to mark up your examples.
Dependent clauses
As you may have inferred, a clause is like a phrase in all respects except that it does contain a verb. Examples:
Adjective clause: Frank, who lived to shock people, had a cobra tattoo on his left arm.
Adverb clause: Tammy Parker blushed when Ken gawked at her lustrous brown hair.
Noun clause: Nathan will tell you that the chicken pox is no laughing matter.
Your task is to show many more examples and discuss how the clause in each example functions as an adjective, adverb, or noun. Then ask your students to create a dozen or more sentences containing the various clause types. Each clause should be underscored and labeled. Let the class comment on the results in an open discussion.
Verb complexities
Verbs are shape-shifters, the trickiest part of speech to master. There is so much to learn about them. Is a given verb regular or irregular? Active or passive? Main or helping? And how do verbs change to express present, past, future, continuous, and hypothetical action?
Can verbs even become different parts of speech? Yes! They can transform into verbals, of which there are three kinds: participles, which are verbs acting like adjectives; gerunds, which are verbs acting like nouns; and infinitives, which are verbs acting like nouns, adjectives, or adverbs.
Explain and exemplify the foregoing topics in the context of full sentences. Assign homework that asks students to do the same with their own sentences, according to your requirements. For example: “Write a sentence containing a form of buy as a passive main verb in the future perfect tense” or “Write a sentence containing run in a perfect participle phrase.” A class discussion of the results is essential.
Don’t talk about verb aspects. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, as are verb moods. The moods that grammarians attribute to verbs are more accurately attributed to sentences. I’ll elaborate in the next section.
Sentence purposes
Besides differing in complexity, sentences differ in purpose. There are six purposes:
Decalarative: The robin ate the worm.
Interrogatve: Did the robin eat the worm?
Dialogic: “Dear robin, there’s a worm right in front of you.”
Imperative: Eat the worm already!
Exclamatory: It threw up the worm!
Hypothetical: I wish it had eaten the worm. This purpose has been called, unhelpfully, the subjunctive mood. Its effect on the past tense of to be verbs will need explaining.
Sentence flow and complexity
You may have noticed that I’ve been discussing sentences, implicitly and explicitly, for some time. It would have been impossible to discuss the properties of words, phrases, and clauses without putting them in context, and that context, of course, is a sentence. Now it’s time to look at flow and complexity within a sentence.
Flow and complexity are largely controlled by conjunctions, but ones your students might not be familiar with. For example, correlative conjunctions:
No sooner had I washed my car than two pigeons flew by.
Not only do I like spotless cars, but I’m also a bird admirer, usually.
Either I’ll turn on the hose again or get my shotgun.
Many subordinating conjunctions are familiar but infrequently thought of as conjunctions:
Please don’t disturb me while I’m eating.
Now that I’ve finished the salad, you may talk until the lamb arrives.
If you’re going to talk about Bruce, I’ll have indigestion for sure.
After you’ve presented these conjunction types, hand out lists of them. Here’s a list of correlatives and a list of subordinates you can use. Ask your students to create a half-dozen correlative examples and a dozen subordinate ones. Let them comment on their work in a class discussion.
Sentence transitions
Adverb phrases are useful in moving from sentence to sentence (or to sentence fragment). Examples:
Never give money to people you don’t know. Above all, if they contact you from Nigeria.
From childhood, I’ve put my spare change in a big glass jar. As a result, I drive a Lamborghini today.
Howard hated big, slobbery bulldogs; on the other hand, Bichon Frises delighted him.
Even simple adverbs work well as a transition aid. Examples:
Dorthea put cyanide in Alfred’s cocktail. Fortunately, he’s a teetotaler.
Rodney knocked on Gina’s door. Apprehensively, she opened it.
Phil was listening to iTunes through his headphones. Heedlessly, he crossed the boulevard.
To help your students with their homework, you can hand out this mixed list of subordinate conjunctions and adverb phrases.
Paragraphs
If your students can write two sentences together without producing a non sequitur, they can write three or four or five cohesive sentences. The result will be a paragraph, a group of sentences that state an opening idea and then elaborate on it. The trick is to start with a provocative sentence, one that makes the reader think, “Oh yeah? — prove it!” or “Please tell me more!” Here’s an example of each:
America has never been at peace. It was born in war, and from that moment on, it has been at war for 93% of its history. “What about the other 7%?” you ask. Call that “peace” if you like, but I call it “getting ready for the next time.” Not only did America spend money on new armaments and training in each successive gap, it spent more money with each iteration. All in the name of preparedness.
After only a week at summer camp, I knew in my soul that I had to kill my counselor. His name was Wesley Shitbag, but most people called him either “Wes” or “Seabeck.” He was skinny and a runty 5’ 9”. A permanent leer possessed his face, and his first words to me were, “Carl, right? You’re kind of a fatty, Carl, but by the end of camp, you’ll be something a girl can look at.”
The “Never at Peace” example could become the first paragraph of an essay. I’d follow it with paragraphs about the undeclared war against Native Americans, expansion into Texas, the growth of jingoism, and so on. The “Summer Camp” example could become an autobiographical sketch or a short story. In each case, you should ask the class, “What would you add to this beginning?” and build an outline together. Then send them home with the outlines and an assignment to write the next two paragraphs of one or the other. Offer extra credit for each additional paragraph a student writes.
A reminder
I hear you asking, “What about subjects, predicates, subject-verb agreement, cases, direct objects, indirect objects, verb conjugations, pronoun declensions, and syntax? And there’s nothing about commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, and quotation marks.” So I remind you that all of these subjects must be taught in a writing context. Your best opportunity to teach them lies in examining your and your students’ examples of writing constructions. Never teach a stand-alone lesson like “What is Subject-Verb Agreement?” or “What Are the 10 Uses of a Comma?”
Most of all, you’re thinking, “What are this guy’s credentials? Has he ever taught anything?” My answer may be less than satisfying. I’m an opinionated old man with a laptop and an Internet connection. I also spent 38 years writing and editing for Silicon Valley employers. Plus, I have a solid connection with someone who actually teaches writing.
The Scratching Post 