Crafting sentences: Four simple writing techniques to elevate your students’ learning

Have you ever marked student assessments and found your feedback to every second student is to “add more detail”, only to find that those same students generally don’t add more detail in the next round of work they submit?

This is one of the most common challenges for teachers, particularly as students move through upper primary and secondary school. Sentence expansion activities are an excellent vehicle for explicitly teaching, modelling, and gradually releasing the skill of adding detail to a sentence.

In a sentence expansion activity, students add detail to a simple sentence, drawing from a given source or previous learning, with the teacher directing them to the critical content through questions or question words.

In table 1, taken from a primary history lesson, the teacher has students retrieve critical information from the lesson by asking questions to probe for more detail, scaffolding and effectively guiding students through writing an expanded sentence about the First Fleet arriving in Sydney Cove.

Although these types of activities are common in early childhood classrooms, particularly to first introduce students to key syntactic structures, they remain an excellent vehicle for more open retrieval of information when working with older students.

For example, in this secondary Religious Education lesson on the Diocletian Persecution (table 2), students are asked to retrieve multiple key ideas to expand the sentence “They persecuted Christians.” before constructing their more detailed sentence.

In a sentence summarising activity, teachers guide students to create high-quality, structured summaries using question words to direct them to the critical content.

When we summarise, we identify the essence of the information before us. Yet, we also know that novice learners often misunderstand what is considered to be critical content, making summarising very difficult. I’m sure that teachers have all experienced when students’ summaries of text are often nearly as long as the original text themselves!

Sentence summarising activities help to guide students towards including the critical content in their sentences, and to help them order their thinking. This is especially powerful during the initial stages of instruction when students are encountering multiple new ideas, and also during further instruction when we can expose students to additional layers of information and support them to read more complex texts.

Beyond the direct benefits for reading comprehension, the ability to summarise is essential for writing effective paragraphs (Hochman & Wexler, 2017; McLean & Griffiths, 2022; Sedita, 2019). Such sentences serve as ideal topic or concluding sentences for the commonly used TEEL (or other) paragraph writing structure in extended writing tasks. Image 3 is a slide taken from our Masterclass Course for Years 3-10 teachers, which explains the four steps required to create an effective sentence summary activity.

The impact of learning to combine sentences on student writing has been highlighted by literature reviews into effective writing instruction (Graham & Hebert, 2010; McLean & Griffiths, 2022; Sedita, 2019). In these activities, students combine shorter sentences of critical content to improve sentence quality, complexity and variety.

Sentence combining is one of the most studied techniques for improving student writing, even if it has not been adopted widely in classrooms. One reason for this might be that teaching sentence combining can be surprisingly tricky. Teachers are experts in their domains of knowledge and the curse of expertise can make the task of combining sentences appear deceptively simple. Consequently, teachers may find it difficult to explain to students exactly what they are doing and the decisions they are making, as they model combining sentences together. Many students are familiar with conjunctions such as ‘and’, ‘or’, or ‘but’ but they don’t always find it straightforward to apply this knowledge when combining sentences.

Let’s have a look at two examples using different source materials to practice sentence combining.

In the first example (image 4), the teacher used a more traditional approach to sentence combining where students were provided with three sentences about inflation and tasked to create one combined sentence. In this second example (image 5), an art teacher uses three sentences and a graphic organiser with visuals to support students to create a combined sentence about the concept of ‘tone’.

It can be more straight-forward to initially introduce sentence-level writing during lessons before using them in review activities. During lessons, teachers have more time to guide practice and gradually release the writing skill and this ensures a higher success rate for their students. However, once teachers have guided a few examples in their lessons, sentence-level writing can often be incorporated efficiently into daily, weekly, or monthly reviews and practice to help students focus on retrieving key information and practice constructing well-written sentences using this key information.