Teaching Sentence Variety

The instructional design in Expressive Writing focuses on teaching a variety of sentences. The teaching of sentences starts with some basic, simple declarative sentences. For example, students learn to write:

• ‘Rayyan ran home after school.’
• ‘That car needs two new tyres.’

The advantages of teaching students to write basic sentences initially are:

• Punctuation-capitalisation requirement is minimised, as most basic sentences require only a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence and a full stop at the end.
• Active voice is used, as the sentences only need to describe the name and inform about what a person or thing did.
• Errors are corrected only for omitted capital letters and periods.
• Mastering basic sentences helps establish a foundation for writing more complex sentences.
• Students are taught that any changes to basic sentences require changes in punctuation. For example, in the sentence ‘The girl ran and swam and climbed,’ if the ‘and’ between ‘ran’ and ‘swam’ is removed, it should be replaced with a comma.

This strategy of teaching basic sentences helps students to master sentence-construction skills.