Writing Sentences

One tutoring approach: As I teach students to read — preferably from the beginning, so I don’t have to unteach bad habits later, but whenever I can — I teach punctuation as *a normal and useful part* of reading. Periods tell you when to stop and take a breath, commas tell you when to pause, question marks tell you to raise your tone because you’re asking a question, quotation marks tell you somebody is talking so you have a change of voice, and so on. If you read all the punctuation marks as you go and find they give you useful information, then it seems normal to put them in writing. Punctuation should be *part* of writing, not an afterthought. So as I am coaching the student to write I ask him what he wants to say, which will generally be a sentence, and when he puts the first letter on the paper, I say “OK, what kind of “P” should we use to start?” and when he gets the last word down I ask, “OK, what do we need now?” This develops (slowly, very slowly) a habit of thinking in terms of sentences, starting with a capital and ending with a period. Then after a while, when the student pauses in a longer sentence, we get to commas, and so on.

MS Word is *horrible* about semicolons. It isn’t all that hot on commas either.

My personal opinion of the grammar check is that it is written by someone with barely high-school writing skills himself, and it’s intended to correct basic writing up to high school level but that’s it. It consistently marks wrong anything that is at a literary level of writing. I don’t remember the source, but back when grammar check first came out, one person claimed to have run the Gettysburg Address through it — and it found dozens of so-called “errors”, ie language usage beyond basic.
One example is the semicolon — the author of the grammar check either didn’t like semicolons or didn’t know how to use them, and grammar check consistently marks every sentence with a semicolon as an error. Another example is the pluperfect or past perfect tense — for example, “Before the sun came up, Grandpa Jones had fed the horses and had had his own breakfast.” The grammar check consistently marks the “had had” as an error, as a duplication of words, even though it is an important tense marker that helps make English a clear and concise language.

A side note — many people used to believe that anything that was published in an actual book had to be true. This belief is fading a bit and at least some people are becoming more critical readers. But now many people believe that anything in the computer program has to be true. Remember that these programs are produced by fallible human beings like the rest of us!
Often they may be even more fallible, being computer experts and not in general language or education experts.

Back to the comma rule: First, say the sentence out loud. Limit yourself to one idea at a time; if you go on to a new idea, that’s a new sentence (more on this later.) Now, wherever you pause for a second or change your tone to denote a subtopic, that is a place for a comma. *Caution* — once comma use becomes natural, it’s easy to move into over-use; go over your writing and edit, and if it looks like a forest of commas, remove all those that don’t seem to clarify the meaning.
By the way, the previous sentence was one that naturally called for a semicolon. The semicolon is a halfway step between a compound sentence and two separate sentences. When two ideas require clearly separate statements so they can’t be joined easily by a conjunction, but the ideas are so closely connected that you don’t want to separate them too far, that is where you use the semicolon.

A basic sentence has a subject and a verb (Ask: who did what?). Then it ends with a period or other stop. If you have two verbs that aren’t part of the same phrase, ie two separate actions, you need a conjunction such as and, but, or, if, when, so, because, etc. Kids have a tendency to tell stories that run on with and … and … and … This is irritating in speech and very poor in writing. Encourage the student first to get one idea at a time and to isolate the subject and verb by asking who did what; then stop. After simple sentences are mastered, then encourage adding more descriptive words to the basic sentences. Finally, after you have some detail , encourage combining the simple sentences into more complex ones. In this way you’ll get richness of ideas rather than run-on.

I’m adding a second post concerning a technique I saw some years ago and was wondering about after the earlier question.

This is a program I saw about fifteen years ago when I was tutoring. One of my students had the workbook. At first I thought the idea was terribly simplistic and so I didn’t go into it, but the more I thought about the better it looked. The basic idea is that students tend to write lots of simple declarative sentences of the same pattern: I got up. I got dressed. I had breakfast. I went to work. I had lunch. And so on. This program taught students to use more complex and interesting writing patterns by starting out with those simple sentences and using different kinds of conjunctions or other methods to combine them. As a side effect, this should also help students understand more complex sentences in reading.
Has anyone seen or used this program, and how did it work out?

nt

You wrote:

>> *Caution* — once comma use becomes natural, it’s easy to move into over-use; go over your writing and edit, and if it looks like a forest of commas, remove all those that don’t seem to clarify the meaning. <<

As a writer, I had to laugh at this one. My editor once told me that a large part of her job was taking commas away from those who used too many, and giving them to those who used too few.

Karen