Writing Full (and I Mean Really Full) Sentences in Subjects

When we quiz students for knowledge retrieval, we are helping them remember key knowledge but we aren’t helping them build that knowledge into rich connected schema. This is where sentences can be useful.

The writing of lower attaining students tends to restate the knowledge you taught strung into a sequence. The might use simple conjunctions like ‘and’ and ‘then’. Higher performing students tend to add a lot more detail into their sentences.

A lower performing student might recall the facts:

“The Treaty of Versailles had harsh terms. The German people were resentful and the Nazi party rose.”

We should be pushing for this:

“The harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles led to resentment in the German people, creating the conditions for the rise of the Nazi party.”

Some students seem to learn how to go this magically, but many of your students won’t. I have three strategies which can help.

Teaching Strategy #1: Combining Sentences

Provide two clauses and ask students to link them with a conjunction. For example:

• the temperature increases
• the rate of reaction increases

You might get sentences like:

1. The temperature increases and the rate of reaction increases
2. Because the temperature increases, the rate of reaction increases.
3. The rate of reaction increases as the temperature increases.
4. As the temperature increases, the rate of reaction increases.
5. The rate of reaction increases as the temperature increases.

Use a visualiser to compare these sentences.

Sentence 1 gives you the least information about the relationship between the two clauses – they just both happened to happen. You want to move your students on from this.

“Because” adds causation to the sentences. The ‘because’ sentences are much richer than sentence 1.

“As” tells you that the two variables both change together – a very useful relationship in many subjects (e.g. As the winter set in, German supplies ran low. As the current slows down, the sediment begins to precipitate out).

Lemov calls this comparison and discussion “Sensitivity Analysis” – you are helping build your students’ sensitivity to these subtle effects.

Teaching Strategy #2: Completing Sentences

In Hochman and Wexler’s excellent The Writing Revolution, the authors introduce the but, because, so technique for developing rich sentences. The teacher presents a simple subject clause three times followed by one of the three conjunctions:

• Many people migrate to cities but…
• Many people migrate to cities because…
• Many people migrate to cities so…

Your students might complete them like this:

• Many people migrate to cities but others migrate to the countryside.
• Many people migrate to cities because there are more job opportunities in cities.
• Many people migrate to cities so they can become overcrowded.

There are many more of these subordinating conjunctions to choose from. For example: after, although, as, before, even if, even though, if, since, so that, that, though, unless, until, when, where, whereas, whether, and while. I recommend practising using these as often as possible (every lesson?) Hard earned advice: make sure these sentences are possible before you set them! For example:

• At the beginning of the novella, Scrooge is completely isolated from society, as…. (his obsession with wealth has led him to reject companionship.)
• At the beginning of the novella, Scrooge is completely isolated from society, while… (the poor Cratchit family are depicted as being rich in love and community.)
• “At the beginning of the novella, Scrooge is completely isolated from society; however… (the appearance of Marley’s ghost reveals an even more terrible fate of eternal, restless damnation, showing that Scrooge’s current loneliness is only a prelude to a far worse supernatural isolation.”)

(Extra advice: build these up gently – students find them tricky!).

Teaching Strategy #3: Enriching Sentences

The third strategy is also adapted from The Writing Revolution. They take a simple clause (called a kernel) and ask basic who, what, why, when questions about it. For example:

“Scrooge bought a turkey”

The teacher asks a couple of the questions and record the answers:

• who: for the Cratchit family.
• why: because he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future.
• when: on Christmas Day.

The students then write an enriched sentence, for example:

Scrooge bought a turkey for the Cratchit family on Christmas Day because he was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future.

An extension of this activity is for the teacher to set more specific subject questions, for example from physics:

Some alpha particles reflect.

• what did they reflect off?
• why did they reflect?
• what did the other alpha particles do?

The enriched sentence might be:

Some alpha particles reflect off the gold foil because they collided with a gold nucleus, while the other alpha particles either passed through or were deflected a small amount.

Conclusion

You might think that some of these sentences are a bit clunky and lack style. I agree. However, my purpose here isn’t to produce beautiful sentences: it’s to produce thinking – rich and connected thinking. If they can write better too, I’m not complaining.

Ben