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.
