After a great deal of trial and error, I’ve arrived at an effective strategy for introducing this concept.
I show my students a few badly written sentences, and ask what they think of them. After a few brave volunteers have offered their critiques, I show them polished versions of the same sentences. Here, the light of understanding goes on in many eyes. Possibly for the first time in their lives, they have recognized the difference between good writing and bad.
We also discuss what I changed in order to cure the problems.
Here are the sentences I’ve been using as examples. I project them on a screen, with a headline:
Are these good sentences?
- The money in the household shared between the Nora and Torvald contrast the idea of a happy marriage.
- A large part of him quitting was to try and impress Queenie and the girls.
- He calls the customers “sheep” by the way they are all the same.
- Life for the woman in 1894, when this story was written, was nothing desirable.
(The sentences come from student essays on Ibsen’s A Doll House and the stories “A&P” and “The Story of an Hour.”)
After students have commented on the sentences, I explain a few things:
- Each of these sentences expresses an idea that’s valuable—but the awkwardness of the writing is hard to ignore.
- All of the examples could be improved if the writers asked themselves, “What am I trying to say? How could I say it more clearly?”
- For those who saw no problems in the sentences, I explain that this is a skill that develops over time, once you start paying closer attention to sentences.
Next, I show them the sentences again, each paired with an edited version. You’ll notice that some of the revised sentences include more information than the originals. That’s because student writers often leave out details the reader needs. “Slow down,” I tell my classes. “Take your time. Make sure you’ve said everything you need to say.”
- The money in the household shared between the Nora and Torvald contrast the idea of a happy marriage.
- In Nora and Torvald’s household, the husband controls the money and the wife must please him in order to get the cash she needs. The way they handle money shows that their supposedly happy marriage is actually very troubled.
- A large part of him quitting was to try and impress Queenie and the girls.
- Sammy had complex reasons for quitting. One important motive was his desire to impress Queenie and her friends.
- He calls the customers “sheep” by the way they are all the same.
- He calls the customers “sheep” because he thinks they all act the same way.
- Life for the woman in 1894, when this story was written, was nothing desirable.
- Life for women in 1894, when this story was written, was full of limitations and frustrations.
Note: When I show students a possible revision, I try to keep as much of the original as possible. I want to show them sentences they could have written themselves.
Recognizing awkwardness
Some of my students clog their writing with unnecessary words. Some use pretentious phrases in order to impress. Sometimes they simply use the wrong word. (Sammy was memorized by the three girls in bathing suits.) I find commas and semi-colons where they don’t belong, and heated disagreements between subjects and verbs. (The people who live in the house next door is from Mexico.) But more common than any of these problems is the hard-to-categorize Awkward Sentence. Here, the issues are complex and multiple.
Recognizing a bad sentence in their own work may be the hardest skill for students to learn. Knowing that, I lead them to it gradually:
- We begin on the first day, with the paired sentences above.
- When teaching about specific problems in style or grammar, I show them examples of sentences that illustrate the problems, and ask if they can identify what’s wrong. We work together to edit the sentences, and end up with something cleaner and leaner. If I’m teaching them about omitting unnecessary words, for example, I might show them this sentence:
By any measure, Anne Bradstreet was a great, outstanding American poet, and she was also an extremely admirable person, in my opinion.
After editing, we should have something like this:
Anne Bradstreet was a great American poet and an admirable person.
(I can hear the quibbles. That’s your idea of good writing? Please re-read the unedited version. Do you prefer that one?)
- In every essay and homework assignment students hand me, I put brackets around the most problematic sentences and ask them to try to revise those sentences. It doesn’t work for every student, but by the end of the semester, many begin to spot the problems on their own.
- Next comes the steepest step: recognizing problems in their own writing without help. I ask them to look at the homework they’re about to hand in and put brackets around any sentence or phrase they think might be awkwardly written. Some of them nail the task; some struggle and mark sentences that seem fine to me; a few say they can’t spot any problems. You have to weigh instruction against the risk of discouragement: for those who fail to find any awkward sentences, I gently point out one or two that need help.
- On the days when the final drafts of their essays are due, I have them read the first page or two in class before they hand the papers in. I ask them to bracket any awkward sentences or phrases they see. I don’t require them to fix the problems then and there, but if they manage that feat, I bestow praise and exclamation points.
Despite these efforts, there are always a few students who still can’t identify an awkward sentence by the end of each semester. Eventually, I hope, they will begin to see what I was talking about—even if it takes a few more years.
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Teaching them to find the problems in their own work independently
Here are two suggestions I offer my students:
- Finish your drafts early and let them sit for a day or more. Seeing your work with fresh eyes always helps.
- Read your own work out loud—or, even better, have a friend read it to you, because the ear is often a better judge than the eye. Nearly every writing teacher in the United States recommends this, I believe. (Since I know that very few students will do it on their own, I have them try it in class for a few minutes, to see if it works for them.)
I assume that only a handful of students in a hundred will actually take the time to read their work aloud, but I hope that many will make a habit of setting their work aside for a day before editing it.