Most of our struggling and emerging writers completely overuse the short-simple-declarative sentence.
As composition instructors, we acknowledge this – but what tools do we have in the proverbial box to help students write with greater nuance and pizazz?
And … can voice, rhythm, flow even be taught?
Strunk & White, in their seminal text Write It Right, assert that there are 12 different ways to write a single sentence.
They refer to this as Rule #18.
When I inherit a new group of students, I know from experience that the bulk of them will only be able to wield 3-4 sentence constructs. This is what ultimately yields that droning/choppy tone we’ve come to witness in so many drafts we’ve read over the course of our careers.
To equip students with the ability to make more advanced syntactical choices, I have gamified Rule #18 to some extent.
In today’s video, my class is split into two teams for a classic game of Palosebo (Greasy Pole).
Each PowerPoint slide contains a series of statements – all using the short-simple-declarative sentence.
Students need to revise … the goal is to bust out a variety of sentence constructs to achieve better voice, rhythm, flow.
The added element of collaboration and competition is an interesting twist, especially in terms of building engagement.
Link to the video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDXWo1-3RF0&t=155s
If you’d like the game slides, just drop me a line and I’ll send everything your way.
As far as updates go, I am putting together the Teach It “Write” Summer Short-Course Series.
In brief, we will be offering bite-size courses over the summer months as well as the traditional 5-Week Mastermind.
More details to follow.
Happy teaching and happy writing!
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