 Re: Teaching writing
Basic guidelines on teaching writing to teenagers and adults.
1. Teach punctuation marks.
2. The simple sentence. Example (Jack plays soccer). Train her on expanding on simple sentences. Make her expand on this sample sentence as far as she can without changing the main idea which is "Jack plays soccer." Let her add adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and subordinate clauses to the sentence until it becomes very long requiring punctuation marks.
3. Move on to other types of sentences. The compound sentence and the complex sentence
4. Move on to the paragraph. The topic sentence, explaining the topic sentence, giving examples, concluding the paragraph.
5. Introduce paragraphs for and paragraphs against
6. Narrative essay. It's the easiest to begin with. Let her write her own stories.
7. Then move on to descriptive essays which are very similar to narratives.
8. Then move on to compare and contrast essays. They still have elements of description.
9. Then dive into arguments. (Really hard topic).
10. Other formal and informal forms of writing. (Letters, articles, reports, application letter, speech, business letters, etc).
If you get to the 10th item, you would have covered what a 22year old really needs to know as far as writing in English is concerned. This will take you atleast 50hours to teach.  |