writing tools

#14 Teaching Writing – Avoid Choppy Sentences

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Teaching Writing – Avoid Choppy Sentences

Main Idea

ESL students can improve their writing style by learning how to notice and fix choppy sentences with combined clauses that create smooth text with an elegant flow.

Choppy Sentences

Grammatically, there is nothing wrong with choppy sentences. Stylistically, they read poorly. Choppy sentences are commonly written by young children and older students who did not learn how to combine sentences with conjunctions. Here are some examples:

  • Choppy:  I like dogs. Dogs make good pets. Dogs are friendly and loyal.
  • Better:  I like dogs because they are friendly and loyal. That’s why they make good pets.

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#15 Teaching Writing – Avoid Wordy Sentences

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Teach Writing: Editing Sentences

Writing Skills: sentence fluency, editing, word choice

What comes after ESL students write the first draft? Editing.

Learning how to edit their own work is an important English writing skill.

“Edit what?” students might ask.

One answer is to look for two kinds of writing problems in the first draft: wordy sentences and empty phrases. Helping students improve their writing skills by recognizing and fixing these problems is the purpose of this lesson. 

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#16 Teaching Writing via Paraphrasing with Synonyms

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paraphrase writing

Teach Writing via Paraphrasing with Synonyms

Main Idea

This English writing lesson teaches ESL students how to improve sentence flow and expand their vocabulary range by paraphrasing key words and phrases with synonyms.

Benefits

With a broader, deeper vocabulary range, ESL students have some of the tools they need to write with greater clarity, variety and productivity. Without a strategy to improve their lexical strength, it is hard for ESL students to improve the quality of their writing.

Example

Find a synonym for the underlined words/phrases. Re-write each sentence using these new words or phrases. For example:

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#17 Teaching Writing via Proofreading Skills

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TEACHING ENGLISH PROOFREADING SKILLS

One of the challenges associated with teaching English writing in Korea is the mindset of ESL students. Not many, it seems, have been exposed to process writing. By that, I mean the expectation that a piece of text will undergo several stages of proofreading and editing before it is considered good or complete.

Because students have not had much exposure to process writing, most are poor at proofreading (i.e. finding and correcting text errors) and editing (i.e. making substantial changes to the text with additions or deletions).

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