Writing and sentence structure worksheets
December 20, 2018 6:46 AM   Subscribe

I’d like to help a very bright and academically successful teenager improve her writing.

Right now she’s struggling with passive voice, pronouns that don’t refer to what she thinks they do, convoluted sentences where she’s trying to make the object into the subject, and lots and lots of extraneous words. Once in a while it’s outright word salad.

It turns out the school district she goes to never taught grammar as such, and often she recognizes that there’s something awkward or wrong about a sentence, but she can’t identify what it is or how to fix it. So I’m looking for some kind of workbook or set of printables she could go through to learn to recognize and fix these patterns — something with lots of examples.

Ideally this would be the sort of thing she could go through in a couple of hours a day over the winter break. I’m imagining worksheets like “cross out all of the unnecessary words in these sentences” and “which word does this pronoun refer to.” Though if you know of a different approach that might work, I’m all ears. Thanks!
posted by Andrhia to Writing & Language (16 answers total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is a great comprehensive treatise, with exercises, on how to avoid wordiness.

That said, my students who've had trouble with objects and pronouns usually have to learn those things independently of reducing wordiness. Grammar Bytes! is one of my favorite resources for learning the basics.
posted by Alex Haist at 7:18 AM on December 20, 2018


Diagramming sentences is the classic technique for acquiring a deep formal understanding of sentence structure, and it can be pretty fun/satisfying as an activity-- sort of like doing a puzzle or a word search. I don't have specific resource recommendations there, but searching "diagramming sentences" on Amazon brings up lots of workbooks.

Possible other approaches:
--Have her read each draft aloud before finalizing it; this often highlights syntactic tangles that weren't obvious during the writing process. It can also draw the writer's attention to more subtle problems with rhetorical flow, like misbalanced sentences or emphasis that falls confusingly on the wrong word.

-- Make sure she's clearly outlining what she's trying to say, in concise bullet points/keywords/diagrams NOT full sentences, before she starts writing. Sometimes the "word salad" happens when writers get lost mid-sentence and forget what they were saying, or else just never had anything clear to say in the first place. If she's just sitting down and writing papers from beginning to end, remind her that that's called "freewriting" and is a great idea-generation technique, but NOT a substitute for the more mindful crafting of the paper itself.

-- Does she read much? It may be that as she starts having more sophisticated things to say, her ideas are outpacing her expressive resources. Just as we learn to speak by listening, we mostly learn to write by reading, so maybe see if you can get her some engaging, high-interest models of e.g. philosophical writing, or literary analysis, or general arts-&-culture journalism.
posted by Bardolph at 7:19 AM on December 20, 2018 [12 favorites]


Professional editor and former teacher of freshman composition here. I like The Transitive Vampire, because the examples are amusing and the explanations are clear.
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 7:43 AM on December 20, 2018


The Hemingway App is my dirty little secret for cleaning up people's awful professional speak, turning it into clear direct sentences.
posted by entropone at 8:30 AM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


--Have her read each draft aloud before finalizing it; this often highlights syntactic tangles that weren't obvious during the writing process.

This is the single best piece of writing advice I ever got or gave. Corollary: If you have to take a breath during a sentence, it's probably too long.
posted by Etrigan at 8:57 AM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Another suggestion: take one of her longer pieces a few days after she's written it and have her reduce it to outline form. That may help her to see the way she's not conveying what she wants to convey.

I was also going to say, with Bardolph: this is not the short-term answer, but in the long term, she won't become a good writer unless she reads widely in good prose, on whatever topics happen to suit her fancy. (Also, in the long run, while it's necessary to learn rules of grammar, rules of composition tend to degenerate into pedantry almost as soon as you begin to generalize. Ultimately, you can only learn by feel what approaches yield what effects.)
posted by praemunire at 9:03 AM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


(P.S.: remember that the reviling of the passive voice is a weird shibboleth. It has a very honorable function in English prose. "Avoid the passive voice if at all possible" is the kind of "rule" made up by people who think rules substitute for judgment.)
posted by praemunire at 9:04 AM on December 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


Following with interest for everyone's suggestions of resources, as this is exactly what I run into with the GRADUATE STUDENTS (in the humanities!) that I have tutored/advised. You are doing her such an enormous favor by helping her learn these skills as a teenager!

There's a "brain training" phone app called Elevate that has exercises to improve writing, including wordiness and grammar, with a pre-quiz that assesses starting skill levels. Also to improve reading comprehension, which is the flip side, no? The aesthetics of the app are lovely, so much so that the exercises are quite compelling and fun. It's really nicely designed. However, after a 14-day free trial, it requires a yearly subscription that's pretty darn pricey IIRC. (Worse, they automatically charge you unless you proactively cancel at the end of the trial. I am absolutely fine with paying people for their work, but come on, don't be shady. Regardless, I liked it so much that I just put a reminder on my calendar)

My other favorite trick is to have a student mark up someone else's published writing that could have benefited from tougher editing. Worksheet exercises are great for demonstrating specific errors, of course, but the writing itself doesn't serve any real communication purpose. Look at letters to the editor for local newspapers and blogs/magazines on a subject of interest to her -- I bet you can find something excessively wordy and passive with some pronoun antecedent errors and such. Give her a red pen and have her rip it apart.
posted by desuetude at 9:24 AM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Khan Academy's SAT practice section might be helpful. Under Reading and Writing, there's a whole set of Grammar and Effective Language Use skills. There are explanatory videos (which are just okay, not great) and practice questions, and after you try answering each question you can see an explanation of what the right answer was and why.

The nice thing about Khan Academy is that it's completely free and accessible from any computer (or even a teenager's phone.) And since this teenager is likely going to want to take the SAT at some point, doing work to prepare for that might feel more useful than just working on grammar for its own sake.
posted by Redstart at 9:38 AM on December 20, 2018


It honestly sounds like she hasn't done enough reading, as in real, actual reading of books and novels, as opposed to junk on the internet. It can be taught in the manner you're seeking, but it's still going to be formal and stilted and not something she's just naturally processing in the way that a fluent, well-read person does.

If you go one of these routes to attempt a quick fix, it needs to be followed up by a regular reading habit to create that long-term, effective fluency.
posted by stormyteal at 11:31 AM on December 20, 2018 [6 favorites]


Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) is stuffed with easy to follow guides and lots of worksheets and exercises. When I was teaching and tutoring it was a regular go-to for brushups and mini lessons on grammar, style, and structure.
posted by notyou at 9:48 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Triage. Tackle one thing at a time starting with the most-addled/reader-addling thing she's doing. I wouldn't fiddle with passive voice at this vulnerable stage. Most kids mix it up with past tense and in my experience, yacking about it compounds their confusion. If it's the only thing somebody's doing, I might bring it up, but mostly I try to make sure sentences have both subjects and verbs and that the subjects and the verbs agree with one another and that fused sentences get unfused.
posted by Don Pepino at 5:32 AM on December 21, 2018


For passive voice, I show students how it's used to obscure responsibility for an opinion/action in some context that will get their sense of justice going. And then I tell them the "by zombies" trick for finding it. I'm not an absolutist by any means, but I think it's worth it to plant the seed of using passive voice knowingly and responsibly. (Besides, it's usually an ingredient making their already confusing sentences even more garbled.)
posted by desuetude at 7:22 AM on December 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


My high school creative writing teacher created a four-year program to help his students kit out their writing toolboxes. I benefited from his Core Sentences approach and have felt, for more than 30 years, that it was a remarkable and practical foundation, one on which I have been able to build a lifetime of professional and personal writing, even after going on to university for journalism and creative writing.

The meat of the writing program is a set of essays, each of which is composed of 4-5 sentence structures, grammatical constructions, rhetorical styles, and/or genres. The relevant structure of each sentence is labeled, e.g. "several introductory prepositional phrases" or "parallel structure in the phrase of apposition." The assignment/exercise for us as students was to write our own essay, mimicking the sentence structures precisely, but using a topic of our choosing or one we were studying in another class. We sometimes wrote essays about what we'd read in Latin or learned in biology earlier in the day. Each essay is only 4-5 sentences long, but it demanded us to really think out a topic and understand the salient grammatical/structural points well enough to apply them meaningfully. The "Core Sentences" get more complex as the year goes on, and get more complex each year of high school.

Mr. Vanston is dead now--he was a funeral director when not teaching, and his wry observations on life and poetry and writing affected his students deeply--but his High School Writing Program lives on digitally and I've just printed it out to give to my soon-to-be high schooler.
posted by cocoagirl at 10:17 AM on December 21, 2018


Encourage her to look up words she doesn't know and follow their etymology as a constant practice.
posted by effluvia at 11:44 AM on December 21, 2018


Some of the English teachers at my school assign grammar homework on No Red Ink.

I agree with the suggestions to encourage more reading, and with showing her real-world examples of writing that could be improved. My mom (an English and composition teacher) used to get out her red pen and encourage us kids to mark up teacher newsletters and field trip letters and things that came home from school to see if we could find any errors or improve the writing.

For a print resource for grammar explanations and examples, we had a Hodges Harbrace Handbook around the house growing up. If you asked mom a grammar or composition question while working on a paper, the answer was "Consult the Hodges Harbrace!" and she'd help you find the answer to your question in there.
posted by abeja bicicleta at 2:50 AM on December 22, 2018


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