Writing Class 2014: Week 7

Textbook Answers

Here are the answers for Unit 4 of the textbook.

This Week

This week we will review the English writing skills that the ESL students have learned so far in the semester. This review will prepare the students for the mid term exam, which is next week.

Writing Skills 

We learned the Six Writing Traits to make your writing more interesting.

  1. IDEA: message, the content.
  2. ORGANISATION: structure. There is a beginning and an end.
  3. VOICE: We sense there is a person writing to us, not a robot. There is feeling, humor, personality.
  4. WORD CHOICE: descriptive vocabulary. Great words paint a picture.
  5. SENTENCE FLUENCY: Long an short sentences have impact.
  6. CONVENTIONS: spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar and paragraphing.

We practiced writing with these traits by:

  1. summarizing a story about a boy (Howl) and describing your own ideas
  2. using articles A and THE correctly with the dog and sausage story (pictures)
  3. writing with voice and adding details with the rafting story
  4. writing clearer sentences by removing unnecessary words (e.g. Helen is a smart and intelligent woman.)
  5. learning new vocabulary and practicing simple sentence writing with the textbook (units 1, 2, 3 and 4)
  6. careful writing by rewriting the spider and hyena story
  7. write sentences with parallel structure to create nice style
  8. use good paragraph organisation in the story that compares and contrasts two things
  9. making stories more interesting with better descriptions (i.e. a man at a party)
  10. improving sentence fluency by seeing and fixing choppy and run on sentences
  11. practicing writing about specific actions with a variety of verbs (Tiny Story video)
  12. practicing writing interesting descriptive stories with the video Room 8

Mid Term Exam

For the mid term exam you can expect:

  1. a summary writing question, like you see below.
  2. some paragraph editing exercises, similar to those below
  3. vocabulary comprehension question from the textbook, chapters 1 to 4
  4. a few questions to check your technical sentence skills – parallel structure, edit wordy sentences, fix choppy and run on sentences
  5. one short story that you have already written – a) dog and sausage or b) man in the party
  6. a new one paragraph answer to a question that you have not seen before

Download this worksheet to read a few sample questions for the exam.

New Writing Exercises

1. Write a Summary

Read the passage. Write a summary – 3 to 5 sentences – and describe the main ideas of the story.

Snow

A layer of fresh white snow can brighten a winter day. But snow is more than just beautiful. It is helpful, too. Snow benefits plants, animals, and people in many ways.

Snow helps plants that stay in the ground all winter. It does not kill plants. Snow acts as a shield. Snow keeps air beneath it. This air below the snow is warmer than the air above it. The warm air protects plants. Cold winter winds and ice storms cannot reach the plants. Plants stay alive through the worst winter weather.

Snow helps animals, too. Some animals sleep below ground. They spend the whole winter there. A blanket of snow keeps the nests warm. Other animals do not sleep below ground. They make a home in the snow itself. They make nests there. Compared with the cold air above, snow nests are cozy.

Snow also benefits people. It helps many people earn a living. Some cities are popular winter sport tourist destinations. Many visitors go there to ski. People who live and work in these places need snow. Without snow, they would have no business.

Snow is useful even when it melts. Melting snow runs into wells. It flows into rivers and streams. These supply water to towns and cities. Farms benefit from melting snow as well. Some areas are dry in summer because they get little rain. Nearly all their water comes from melted snow. The water is stored in lakes and ponds. It is used during the growing season to water fields and orchards. Without this water supply, there could be no crops. In this way, the summer harvest depends on winter snow.

2. Edit Paragraphs

Find the errors and rewrite the paragraphs.

Edit 1

January 21, 1976 was an historic day. On that day, two supersonic Concorde aircraft made there first flights. One took of from London and the other from paris. Later that year, the first Concorde flew to New York. The flight from London to New York took about three ours. Other planes took twice the time to make that flight! The fleet of Concorde’s was retierd in 2003. Over the years, the planes had carryed more then 2.5 million passengers.

Editing 2

Do you know wear the longest rode on Earth can be found. The Pan-American Highway begins in alaska. It passes through Canada the United States and Mexico. Than it continues down the west coast of South America all the way to Chile. Altogether, the highway passes through 12 countrys. It passes through jungles and mountains the road is about 16,000 miles long. At this time, only one 54-miles stretch of the road remains to be completed.

Editing 3

Are you familiar with the work of Marie Curie. Born in Warsaw Poland, on November 7, 1867, Curie was a Chemist and physicist. She and her husband, Pierre won the Nobel Prize in 1903 for there discovery of the element radium. In 1911, Marie becomes the first person to win the nobel Prize twice she won the second award for her study of radioactivity. Marie died in 1934 from cancer cause by her long contact with radiation.

 

 

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