Category Archives: The Weekly Text

Here is the fourth lesson plan of the Styling Sentences Unit. This one, as the header on this post indicates, deals with an internal series of appositives or modifiers enclosed by a pair of dashes and parentheses.

This lesson opens with this worksheet on parsing sentences to find the adjectives in each clause. And here is the worksheet with explanatory and mentor texts–the former, of course, the excursus on the use of dashes and parentheses. This worksheet contains no modified cloze  exercises or other supported materials, only mentor texts which students will use to draft their own prose using this relatively complicated sentence structure. Obviously, such supported work is possible here, but it will require a lot of thought and careful composition and editing.

Your thoughts?

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Here is the third lesson of the Styling Sentences Unit. This one, as the header indicates, prescribes a sentence structure with an introductory series of appositives (with a dash and a summarizing subject) that includes an excursus on appositive nouns.

I open this lesson with this parsing sentences worksheet for nouns, which, as it sounds, calls upon students to parse a series of sentences to find the nouns in them. Finally, here is the worksheet with explanatory and mentor texts that is the primary work of this lesson. Once again, there are no modified cloze exercises on this worksheets; rather, there are mentor texts, sentences in the form the lesson seeks to help students learn to write. Unlike other lessons in this unit, I am still less than certain how I might go about developing some structured practice for sentence structures this complicated.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

This week’s Text is a the first lesson of fifteen in the Styling Sentences unit, this one on a series without a conjunction with an excursus on the colon, lists, and the serial comma. This lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the grammatical concept of subordination, something, I think it’s fair to say, that anyone who needs to write well should know. Finally, here is the worksheet with comprehensive examples of the sentence structure under study.

Unlike most of the materials related to writing instruction you will find on this blog, this material is relatively unsupported. There are no modified cloze exercises (though, in reviewing this material, I understood how to go about preparing some, a maneuver that stymied me when I first contrived this unit), simply mentor sentences from the text from which I derived much of the material in this unit to guide students in composing sentences of their own.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.