Writing

The Conventions of Writing

Good writing requires a host of skills in content, organization, and style (including the conventions of written English). The conventions of writing are the generally accepted mechanics of language. They make communication possible. While writers are always consciously or unconsciously attending to the mechanics, they are most often focusing on them in the revision stage, particularly during proofreading. During this stage, students attend to the following:

• form (e.g., paragraph, essay)
• sentence structure (syntax)
• word choice (diction)
• usage
• spelling
• punctuation and capitalization
• appearance (e.g., spacing, indentation, page numbers, quality of hand writing).

Students need to understand that readers expect certain conventions in writing. Surface errors distract the reader. A good revision guide, one that includes editing and proofreading criteria, is a start. Students need to understand how the guide can assist them.

Sometimes, students will need to learn about a particular convention. Instruction is most effective when it is provided at this point. Some instruction can also be given in mini-lessons to groups of students who have a common need. Some instruction can also be given in individual conferences as teachers help students with their writing.

Form

Sentence Structure

Word Choice

Usage

Spelling

Punctuation and Capitalization

Form

Form is basic to all writing. During writing, ideas are given shape and structure. Students need to understand the various formats available to them and understand that purpose dictates the format of each composition. Clear, practical instruction and practice with many models help students understand the range of writing forms available to them.

The following list illustrates the range of prose forms:

Description:	paragraph, essay, character portrait
Narration:	paragraph, essay, anecdote, short story, diary, journal, biography, autobiography, fable, parable, myth, legend, personal letter
Exposition:	paragraph, essay, report, article, research paper, news story, newspaper column, business letter, review, memo
Persuasion:	paragraph, essay, brief, editorial, letter to the editor, review, column.

In prose forms, the basic unit of organization is the paragraph. Paragraph structure varies with the type of material. For example, journalistic publications such as newspapers use a particular format and style with very few sentences; dialogue in narrative text dictates another format; the beginning and ending paragraphs of an essay call for yet another format. Although there is no absolute standard for paragraphs, prose has one essential quality--all sentences in a paragraph must have some meaningful relationship with one another.

Students need to understand the basic elements of a paragraph (i.e., topic sentence/main idea, supporting details, and concluding sentence) and the different methods of development. These include chronological, spatial, and logical order (including listing, comparison-contrast, cause-effect, definition, and problem-solution). Students need to be capable of organizing their ideas in each of the various patterns.

Students also need to understand that purpose can dictate the organization of paragraphs. For example, the journalistic "inverted pyramid" differs from the usual expository pattern. The next page contains illustrations of several paragraph types.

News Story Paragraph Form

Descriptive Paragraph

Narrative Paragraph

Narration differs from description (although description may be embedded in narration). Paragraphs can be used for special purposes: A paragraph, consisting of only two or three sentences, may be used at the beginning of a longer essay to introduce the topic. In narration, the direct speech of a character should occupy a paragraph by itself.

Expository Paragraph

Persuasive Paragraph

Besides prose, students may write poems and plays. Each genre may take various forms:

Poem

• lyrical poems including free verse, songs, cinquains, haiku, tanka, ode, elegy, sonnet
• narrative poems including limericks, ballads, episodes of epics
• dramatic poems including monologues, soliloquies, dialogue.

Play

• monologues and dialogues
• scenes from a play
• a one-act or full-length play.

Form

Sentence Structure

Word Choice

Usage

Spelling

Punctuation and Capitalization

Sentence Structure

The study of language, its elements, and its nature are important components of a language arts program. Grammar and usage cause endless controversy both inside and outside the classroom. Much of this controversy stems from the misunderstanding of terms and their associated concepts. Grammar is perhaps the least understood term. Grammar is not so-called good English, nor is it the abstract study of parts of speech. Certainly grammar is not the mechanical aspects of composition (i.e., punctuation, capitalization, and spelling). Grammar, in its broadest sense, is the study of the way language works. Two aspects of the grammar of English that students need to understand are sentence structure (syntax) and usage.

"Language continues to develop through the use of language, not through exercises in naming of parts" (Sanborn, 1986, p. 74). Diagramming sentences and learning the names of the parts of speech do not improve students' writing or reading but do steal instructional time from meaningful language activities.

Secondary school students should have a number of basic understandings. They should have a good understanding of English syntax--the principles of sentence formation. If students lack these understandings, it is important to take time to teach them.

Discussing and modelling sentence structures can:

• make students aware of the sentence patterns that exist in the English language
• give students a vocabulary for talking about elements of language and for talking about their specific writing problems
• help students use word order patterns to make meaning as they read even if they do not understand all of the vocabulary (e.g.,"Jabberwocky")
• expose students to the many possibilities of English syntax beyond the basic structures.

Sentence Concepts

By the time Secondary Level students have reached this phase of their language development, they should understand certain basic concepts about sentence structures.

They should understand that English language sentences are based on common "kernel" sentences. There are three basic sentence patterns (common kernels) in English:

• S-V (Subject-Verb): Subject and intransitive verb

  Trevor drives. He works.

• S-V-O (Subject-Verb-Object): Subject, transitive verb, and direct object

  The driver delivered the pizza.

  This pattern is sometimes complicated by the insertion of an indirect object (e.g., Trevor told his boss a story.) and by object complements (e.g., The pizza made Trevor famous.).

• S-LV-C (Subject-Linking Verb-Complement): Subject, linking verb, and predicate noun or predicate adjective.

  Pizzas are Italian. Pizzas are nutritious.

About thirty percent of English sentences can be classified as S-V; 40-45 percent as S-V-O; and about 25 percent as S-LV-C (Hook & Evans, 1982, pp. 251-252).

The basic English sentence patterns can be expanded by adding qualifiers/modifiers (words, phrases, or clauses). For example,

Basic sentence:	The pizza cooks.
Qualifiers:	What kind? large, pepperoni How? quickly, to a crisp Where? in the oven Why? so it can be delivered
Expanded sentence:	So it can be delivered, the large pepperoni pizza cooks quickly to a crisp in the oven .

Basic English sentences can also be transformed. Simple transformations include:

• Negative ("not" or "n't" and an auxiliary verb are inserted)

  Pizzas are not junk food.

• Imperative ("you" becomes the subject)

  Eat the pizza.

• Question

  Type 1: Yes-No; subject and auxiliary verb are switched

  Did the pizza get delivered?

  Type 2: Wh-word (who, what, which, when, where, why) or "how" and an auxiliary verb are inserted

  Why do people like pepperoni pizza?

• There ("there" and linking verb are inserted)

  There are nutritious pizzas.

• Passive (the subject and direct object are switched and the main verb is changed to past participle form)

  Pizzas are delivered daily by drivers.

  Complex transformations include:

• Joining (two sentences are joined using conjunctions such as "and", "but", "or")

  Anchovy pizzas are popular. Pepperoni pizzas are popular. Anchovy and pepperoni pizzas are popular.

• Embedding (two or more sentences are combined by embedding one into the other)

  Pizzas are food. Pizzas are nutritious. Pizzas are a nutritious food.

Sentence Combining

Sentences can be combined for variety. Mellon (1967), O'Hare (1973), and Strong (1986) found that students could increase their syntactic fluency and writing ability when introduced to sentence combining activities. Studies show that sentence combining can "lead to fewer excessively short sentences, to a reduction in the number of `and' sentences, and, perhaps most importantly, to a clearer indication of how ideas are related" (Hook & Evans, 1982, p. 254). In addition, sentence combining involves a minimal use of terminology. Some examples follow:

Tom found a wallet. The wallet was old and tattered.

Tom found a wallet that was old and tattered.

John is a fireman. John fights fires.

John who is a fireman fights fires.
OR
John, a fireman, fights fires.

However, teachers using sentence combining need to be careful that students do not always equate longer, often extraordinarily complicated, sentences with "better" sentences. Students need to examine their ideas and not just the number of words in a sentence. "A basic aim of intelligent sentence combining is to make good sentences, not merely long ones. It follows that `decombining' may be at least as important as putting sentences together" (Strong, 1986, p. 18).

Using students' own sentences as much as possible, teachers can explain the rationale behind sentence combining and the appropriate punctuation for combined sentences.

Sentence Errors

Writing requires an understanding of certain sentence conventions. It demands that students consolidate ideas through coordination and subordination and generally state their ideas as clearly and succinctly as possible in an appropriate order. Maxwell and Meiser (1997) identify the major sentence problems of Secondary Level students as:

• trying to say too much in one structure, thus creating a tangled, confused sentence
• writing a series of short, choppy sentences which are unconnected and often redundant
• including more than one main idea, thus making the relationship between ideas unclear
• writing non-sentences or fragments.

Other common sentence errors that cause students problems include:

• vague pronoun reference
• wrong or missing preposition
• comma splice
• tense shift
• unnecessary shift in person
• wrong tense or verb form
• lack of subject-verb agreement
• pronoun agreement error
• dangling or misplaced modifier (Connors & Lunsford, 1988).

Additional errors are related to punctuation (e.g., no comma after an introductory element; no comma in a compound sentence; no comma in a non-restrictive element; possessive apostrophe error; lack of comma in series; unnecessary comma with restrictive element) or word choice (e.g., wrong word, its/it's).

Most errors can be talked about, understood, and corrected with a minimum amount of terminology. For example, a sentence fragment is lacking a key element; to change a sentence fragment into a complete sentence, add whatever is missing--a subject, a verb, or both. The important thing to remember is that teachers should address the specific errors that each student is making. Teachers can use student samples to explain and clarify common student problems with sentence structures.

Sentence Style

Finally, students should learn to attend to stylistic elements of a sentence (Parker, 1982, 1990; Larock, Tressler, & Lewis, 1980). For example,

Conciseness

• Avoid wordy sentences. Eliminate unnecessary words and expressions.
• Avoid over-using "to be", "which", "who", "whom", "that", "it", "this", and "there".
• Always use precise and concrete words.

Forcefulness (Emphasis)

• The strongest positions in a sentence are the beginning and the end.
• Single words and short phrases can also be effective in mid-sentence; sometimes they are set off by punctuation, and sometimes not.
• An existing single word or phrase can often be repositioned for greater emphasis.

Variety

There are a number of ways of adding variety to sentences, including:

• length (short, long; avoid too many short, choppy "baby" sentences)
• structure (simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex)
• purpose (declarative, interrogative, exclamatory, or imperative)
• arrangement (loose, periodic, parallel, balanced, and inverted).

Style is a difficult writing quality to define and is, to a large part, idiosyncratic. For experienced writers the connection between style and "voice" might dictate that a certain type of sentence be used -- a preponderance of short sentences, for example. However, teachers should help students to develop their individual styles in various ways including working on sentence variety--a critical element in writing style.

Form

Sentence Structure

Word Choice

Usage

Spelling

Punctuation and Capitalization

Word Choice

Effective writers can communicate clearly with a careful choice of words. Although good word choice is partly a matter of preference, and therefore style, students should understand that certain choices help communicate their ideas to their readers.

The tools for this search for words include a good dictionary and thesaurus. Students should be encouraged to consider context as well as the following:

• whether they have chosen the precise word to convey their meaning (ambling, striding, walking)
• whether they want to use concrete descriptions or abstract concepts (a specific example of beauty or the abstract term "beauty")
• whether they want to use vivid imagery or plain, straightforward descriptions
• whether they want to use words figuratively or symbolically.

In addition, students should learn to recognize clichés and triteness, and avoid them.

Form

Sentence Structure

Word Choice

Usage

Spelling

Punctuation and Capitalization

Usage

Language usage refers to a person's form of expression--choices of words and structures in both speaking and writing. In different social situations, a person adjusts usage so that language varies according to purpose, content, and intended audience. Usage is what is acceptable in a particular situation. There are no hard and fast rules of language usage but there are ranges of uses appropriate to varying situations. Students should be sensitive to these situations and be comfortable and confident in determining their audience, purpose, and situation as well as the appropriate style for these variables.

Some suggestions for student activities follow:

• Give students situations to explore. For example:
  1. Your family car has coasted across the dock and into the lake. You were in charge of it when the accident happened. Three different audiences are very interested in your short, written account of the incident:
     • a parent
     • the insurance company
     • your friend who left a new CD player in the car.

       Write an explanation for each interested party. Use appropriate language
       (Toronto Board of Education, n.d., p. 95).

  2. Describe a possible audience for each of the following sentences. What particular words in each sentence suit the audience you chose?
     • "My landlord, Harold P. Jones, demands that I pay my rent immediately or face eviction."
     • "Old Jones told me to cough up or ship out."
     • "Mr. Jones wants his rent money now; otherwise he'll force me to leave." (Toronto Board of Education, n.d., p. 96).

• Help students understand the range of "appropriateness" found in the language. Language differs in register according to the writer, the purpose, the audience, and the subject matter. For example:

  Casual: a conversation, a diary entry

  Informal: a class discussion, a personal diary

  Fairly formal: a news report, a formal essay

  Very formal: a lecture, a technical report

• Help students explore the varieties of usage found within a classroom, community, or region. It should be pointed out that speech dialects differ according to region and social group, and that even "standard" English allows for a variety of acceptable speech. Spoken and written language are like fashion. They are a matter of style.

  If we spoke as we write, we should find no one to listen, and if we wrote as we speak, we should find no one to read. The spoken and the written language should not be too near together as they must not be too far apart.
  (T. S. Eliot)

• Help students learn standard usage. Hook and Evans (1982) summarized the most common usage items on which a teacher might focus:
  • verb agreement in number (chiefly the forms of "be" and "have")
  • past tense and past participle forms (about 40 pairs such as "saw-seen" and "took- taken")
  • compound subjects involving pronouns (e.g., She and I were; He and Judy were)
  • pronouns as objects of verbs, prepositions, and verbals (e.g., saw Lois and him, for her and me)
  • adjective wrongly used as a modifier of an action verb (e.g., "The engine runs good.")
  • double subject and double negatives (e.g., not "I don't have none.")(p. 292)

    Other "abusages" for consideration might be: alot, anyways, could of, irregardless, off of, real as an adverb, reason is because, and youse.

    These problems should be addressed when they occur in real contexts rather than addressed through memorization of rules, drill, or discrete exercises. A school staff might decide those items that need to be stressed.

• Capture students' interest in language by discussing such variations as slang, jargon, adspeak, miligab, bureaugab, technogab, and poligab. These forms fascinate students because of their deliberate distortions. Teachers do not need to teach these language variations directly, but can show students the uses and limitations of these various forms. Students can also discover that some people, often teenagers, deliberately choose not to use standard English to distance themselves from mainstream society.

Form

Sentence Structure

Word Choice

Usage

Spelling

Punctuation and Capitalization

Spelling

Spelling plays an important role in communicating through the written word. Students need to realize that spelling errors detract from their overall message and that society, in general, is less tolerant of poor spelling than of any other problems with language.

When students are uncertain about a correct spelling, they need to be aware of the options that they have, including:

• checking a word visually
• using a dictionary
• using a spell-check program on a computer
• asking a good speller.

By far the most effective way of learning to spell is proofreading one's writing. Students can become more effective spellers by:

• checking their own and others' writing carefully for spelling
• analyzing their own spelling problems, grouping them in patterns (e.g., pneumonia, pneumatic), and describing their own spelling rules
• keeping a list of their own demons and periodically having a peer dictate this list
• noting sound-alikes (e.g., their/there/they're) and look-alikes (e.g., then/than) but learning them within an appropriate context
• learning at least three basic spelling rules:
  Rule l: dropping the final "e"
  Rule 2: doubling the final consonant
  Rule 3: learning about "ie" and "ei"
• carefully pronouncing words (e.g., accept/except)
• Using mnemonic devices (e.g., "stationery" where the "e" stands for envelope)
• developing a way of studying new words

  (e.g., examine, pronounce, make associations, cover, write, check).

Form

Sentence Structure

Word Choice

Usage

Spelling

Punctuation and Capitalization

Punctuation and Capitalization

The purpose of punctuation is to help the reader understand the writer's meaning. For example, "I left him convinced he was a fool" is not the same as "I left him, convinced he was a fool". A different intent is conveyed by each of "She is there now.", "She is there now?", and "She is there now!" Variations in punctuation may result in differences in meaning, lack of meaning, or different emphasis.

Most punctuation marks are written substitutes for intonation--visual symbols that have developed as substitutes. Some punctuation marks, such as those found in the business letter, are dictated by custom. Students need to know the basic function of punctuation marks and their "customary" uses in writing.

Marland (1977) recommends that punctuation be taught by function, including:

• the seven ways of marking off a "sense group": the comma, the semicolon, parentheses, the period followed by a space and upper-case letter, the paragraph indentation, the space or signs for section divisions, the chapter- ending space
• the three ways of marking interruptions: a pair of commas, a pair of dashes, a set of parentheses
• the different ways of showing that a word has been borrowed or is being used in a special way: underline, quotation marks, italics, or boldface.

Capitalization is closely related to punctuation. It is also a signal to the reader. A capital letter, for example, announces to the reader the beginning of a new sentence, a title, a name, a day, a month, a place, a season, a direction, a school subject, or a language.

Students can learn to punctuate and capitalize by:

• editing and proofreading carefully their own and their peers' compositions
• learning during mini-lessons the purpose and history of the punctuation marks (e.g., the teacher places text on a transparency, omitting all punctuation and capitalization marks, for students to discuss and punctuate)
• referring to a handbook
• working on trouble spots with the teacher or a peer (e.g., the semi-colon is equal in value to the comma plus coordinate conjunction: ; = , and)
• preparing a punctuation and capitalization rules chart
• writing "la dictée" (i.e., transcribing accurately a dictated selection using correct spelling and punctuation).

A variation of this last strategy would have the teacher distributing unpunctuated and uncapitalized copies of a composition. Students would correct their copies as they listened to the dictation and then compare their copy to the original.