How to help your students improve their writing: sentence expansion and more

We teachers often complain about our students’ dry writing style. Writing is a skill which is teachable but not always taught, at least not with the consistency and perseverance required to produce results. To help students improve their writing, we have to encourage reading -- both intensive and extensive, capitalising on our students’ interests and preferences.

Extensive reading will expose students to a multitude of styles whereas intensive reading will highlight or bring into the foreground what differentiates one style of writing from another. Therefore, both are essential in sensitising students to the subtleties and nuances which constitute a writer’s unique style or set apart one genre from another.

I will focus on adding detail or sentence expansion. There are, of course, various devices to make students’ style more sophisticated: the use of subordinate clauses or prepositional phrases or even nominalisation -- at a more advanced level. There are also different ways for teachers to point out how to achieve this goal. I typically do this when I correct writing tasks by providing alternative ways of expressing some ideas or by qualifying nouns with adjectives or verbs with adverbs.

The above is a rather passive way of teaching though it has its own value. However, I often grab the opportunity to put my students in the position where they will have to work out how to expand sentences. It can easily be done from a beginner level to advanced. Using authentic material offers excellent opportunities for sentence expansion. Take this simple example I used with my B2 and C1 students.

The following sentence is the first one in a news story recently published in Huffington Post:

A drunk Russian man who unsuccessfully tried to hijack an Aeroflot passenger flight was detained by police on Tuesday after the plane made an emergency landing in Siberia, Russian investigators said.

What follows is an activity I prepared for my students:

This is the beginning of a recent news story.

A man who tried to hijack a flight was detained by police after the plane made a landing in Siberia.

Here are some extra details that came to light:

·        The man was Russian and he was drunk during the flight.

·        He didn’t manage to hijack the plane.

·        It was a passenger plane of Aeroflot Airlines.

·        The incident happened on Tuesday.

·        The landing was an emergency.

Try to integrate all the details provided above in the period quoted. Use any devices you need as long as you don’t add any clauses to the existing ones.

Let us look at a slightly different activity. This time it is a very short extract from a Roald Dahl story, in fact one of my favourites: The Hitch-hiker.

What follows is an extract from a story. Some words and phrases have been removed. Place them in the right place in the text:

In the fingers of his right hand, the man was holding up the two books he had taken from the policemen’s pockets. “Easiest job I have ever done,” he announced.

The words and phrases are:

in triumph, long, proudly, delicate

One can vary the difficulty of the activity in different ways: the obvious one is the choice of text but there are more subtle ones such as marking the spaces where the words must go or not.

Poems are ideal to use when it comes to adding detail. The following is a very simple example of how one can combine sentence expansion and adjective order: simply remove and jumble the adjectives and mark the nouns to be qualified in the poem.

Dusk in Autumn

By Sara Teasdale

The moon is like a scimitar,

A little silver scimitar,

A-drifting down the sky.

And near beside it is a star,

A timid twinkling golden star,

That watches likes an eye.

And thro’ the nursery window-pane

The witches have a fire again,

Just like the ones we make,

And now I know they’re having tea,

I wish they’d give a cup to me,

With witches’ currant cake.

Hope you have fun.