Free Banter Web App: Some reluctant writers need a confidence boost at the sentence-level to write better recounts, stories and other texts
I’ve been working with reluctant writers for a long time.
When I first meet a reluctant writer, one of the very first things I check is whether they know how to say and write simple, compound, and complex sentences.
If they can’t, I show them how to do it. Then, we do some together. Finally, we practice until they can do it without any help.
Sometimes, I do this work face-to-face or by telehealth. More often these days, I direct families to my self-paced video courses and Think, then Write Workbooks.
Helping reluctant writers write better sentences
I’ve met lots of students who know how to say and write complex sentences. But, when I look at their writing in the clinic or review their school work, I see sentences like these:
| “The bird went on the tree.” “The man was walking to work.” “The man had dinner.” “The boy did some work.” “Dad got dessert.” “I can play games.” “I went to the park.” “I went to the shops and got some stuff.” |
These sentences are all correct grammatically. But it’s impossible to know exactly what the student is trying to communicate to the reader.
To build confidence to write better sentences, I teach these students a few key skills:
- How to replace general verbs (e.g. “did”, “went”, “got”) with specific verbs (e.g. “printed”, “flew”, “seized”).
- How to replace general nouns (e.g. “bird”, “tree”, “shops”, “stuff”) with specific nouns (e.g. “wedge-tailed eagle”, “gum tree branch”, “Bunnings”, “LED light bulbs”).
- How to expand sentences to explain when, where, how and why the subject of the sentence acted (an old journalist trick!).
I do this using a resource I wrote a while back called Think, then Write: Sentence Writing Bootcamp.
We start with a sentence like:
| I went to the shops and got some stuff. |
We end up with a sentence like:
| At 9am, last Saturday, I drove to Bunnings and bought a hammer and some nails to fix my timber back fence. |
See the difference?
Why sentence expansions help?
Learning to express what you think with more detail and precision in written sentences helps you to:
- think better; and
- communicate your ideas in a way that readers can understand.
It’s also a useful bridge for text-level writing at school, including paragraph writing, talk time toolkit, narrative writing, persuasive writing and even short answer exam questions.
Free sentence expansion practice: a new Web App!
If you know a student who would benefit from a sentence level boost, check out our FREE Sentence Expansion web app.
You don’t need to download anything.
Just sign up for the password below, and have a go!
We hope you find it useful!
Further resources:
Think, then Write Writing Screener
Think, then Write Writing Workbooks
Think, then Write Sentence Writing Bootcamp
Further reading:
Help Your Reluctant Writer: a free Banter ebook
