Sentence revision: Creating sentence variety in essays.
Materials needed:
- Seven different colors of writing implement (a box of crayons/colored pencils/markers—your choice. Just be sure you have 7 different colors of ink.) Note: Alternatively, you also could use color highlight on the computer.
Purpose
You've written your essay; now, let's see if our major writing goals for this essay have been met.
- Varied sentence structure and word choice
- Use commas properly in a series
- Ensure correct capitalization and spelling
Procedures:
- With your yellow color, highlight sentences, which begin with adjectives or adverbs ("Starved, we stopped at McDonald's.")
- With your blue color, underline sentences which begin with prepositional phrases (with..., in..., into..., over...).
- With your red color, underline sentences which begin with "A" or "The", "This", "There", etc.
- With your green color, underline sentences that begin with a pronoun (he, she, we ,it, they, their, our, etc.)
- With purple, underline sentences that begin with verbs ("Whirling around, I saw..." or "Running, she tripped...").
- With brown, underline sentences which begin with a time element or word (after, later that day, also, finally, then, etc.).
- With orange, underline sentences which begin with a noun (Harold, students, cats, etc.)
Finished? All sentences colored.
What do you see?
If you see a rainbow, you have sentence variety. If you do not see a rainbow, revision needs to take place.
Adapted from Alzire Messenger