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Writing Reminders. Specific Purpose, Specific Audience. Writing must have a particular focus and be geared to a specific audience. Remind students to: Students must address the correct audience Remain focused as they write
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Specific Purpose, Specific Audience Writing must have a particular focus and be geared to a specific audience. Remind students to: • Students must address the correct audience • Remain focused as they write • Tie every paragraph to the thesis statement, which should be a response to the writing prompt • Ensure each paragraph incorporates internal transitions to builds on the previous paragraphs
Analyze Mentor Text • Analyze the writing of literature selections. • For example: explain how particular sentence transitions help to present the main idea. • Reading a variety of well written texts will help the students improve their own writing.
Organization • Planning with previously released prompts and discuss the topic from various points of view • Teacher models how to spend the appropriate amount of time to complete the writing process-as a simulation to the FCAT 2.0 Writing Test • Create support sentences for the ideas, using specific concrete details. • Select appropriate transitions to tie paragraphs together in a logical order (external and internal transitions).
Elaboration and Idea Development To elaborate writing, teach students to add the following: • NUMBER DETAILS: date, age, quantity, time, temperature, distance, weight, height, length, width, speed, etc. • NAME DETAILS: proper nouns and specific nouns (rather than “stuff” and “things”) • DESCRIPTIVE DETAILS: sights, smells, tastes, touches, sounds, and colors • COMPARISON DETAILS: compare each of the descriptions to something else (simple similes and metaphors) only when relevant
Sentence Structure Practice using varied sentence types, with appositives, prepositional phrases and conjunctions. Remind students that varying the use of simple, compound and complex sentences, and varying sentence length, creates a more readable and interesting essay.
Standard Usage/Word Choice Provide mini lessons using writing samples in which students are taught to identify correct word usage. For example: Subject/verb agreement, correct use of adjectives, correct use of object pronouns ("Sally greeted Joe and me) Remind students that word choice also impacts readability. • Use active, not passive, verbs. • Address the power of strong action verbs. By eliminating weak verbs (is, are, was, were, be, being, been, get/got, put, take/took, make/made, do/did, go/went, etc.), (The puppy is cute. The cute puppy cuddled on the couch.). • Avoid using common adjectives and adverbs. • Replace common or repetitive words with more descriptive words that help paint a picture in the reader's mind. • Make your that your essay is a memorable one.
Punctuation, Capitalization and Spelling Provide lessons in which students proofread their own work as well as that of other peers to correctly identify misspellings, punctuation and capitalization errors, inappropriate contractions ("its" versus "it's") and grammatical errors.