The secret to successful sentences
One of the things that overwhelms writing students — especially younger ones — is sheer quantity of options.
English is a lexis-rich language whose straightforward grammar allows for endless variations. These facts are the joy and bane of every writer’s life. For most students, they are mostly bane.
Hence, I like to highlight the ways in which English is actually quite easy (!)
Facts so taken for granted that I’d never noticed them before becoming a teacher have become crucial to my writing education practice.
Short. Simple. Straightforward.
Writing isn’t always that, but when I focus on the aspects of writing that are, it assuages student anxiety and demystifies what can seem like an alchemical process.
For example, have you stopped to consider that there are only three terminal punctuation marks in English? That is, only three ways to end a sentence.
And those three punctuation marks — the period/full stop, question mark and exclamation mark — give rise to just four sentence types:
Declarative
Imperative
Interrogative
Exclamatory
That’s it.
Every sentence written in standard English, from Harry Potter to War and Peace to the works of Shakespeare to What Color is Your Parachute? can be categorized as one of those four sentence types. And will end in one of three terminal punctuation marks.
Honing in on the fundamental simplicity of English, rather than succumbing to the temptation to show off its dazzling complexity, gives students a wedge they can shove into a crack in the wall called writing.