Students who write on a computer can have the computer help them
spot potential grammar traps.
Long sentence surprises
Long sentences are not necessarily a problem; long, rambling sentences
could be a trap.
In a long, rambling sentence, inexperienced writers can lose their
sense of direction. They may flounder around making all sorts of
grammatical errors until they finally see a way to end the sentence.
Writers may have several ways to identify long sentences:
-
Writers may be able to set their grammar checker to
flag long sentences.
-
Writers may have a readability option that allows them
to check individual sentence lengths.
-
Writers can use find-and-replace to highlight sentence
boundaries.
Of the three methods, find and replace is the best option for most
writers because
-
The long sentencefeature may flag only waaaay long sentences.
(Mine defines long sentence as 60 words.)
-
The readability option has to be done sentence by sentence,
which takes too long.
-
Find-and-replace is fast and flexible.
And addition
Many rambling writers are and addicts. And addicts
join whole lines of sentences with coordinating conjunctions, like
this:
Coordinating conjunctions are fine, and they have their place,
but they should be used sparingly, and they should not be used
just to make a sentence longer, and even if Caitlin thinks writing
longer sentences is the mark of a good writer and Caitlin wants
to be a good writer, stringing yards of sentences together with
coordinating conjunctions is not a good idea.
And addition is treatable
Treat and addiction with find and replace.
Have and addicts write at a computer. Then have them use
find-and-replace to change every and, but, and or
in a can't-be-missed way. They could use colored type, highlighter,
or replace the words with some silly alternative that would never
appear in their writing.
In the section sentence shown below, I replaced and with
@@@.
Now have students identify the right boundary of main clauses in
the passage using find and replace. I replaced the commas between
the main clauses with a green pound sign (#).
Now have students break the long sentence into shorter sentences.
Research shows that shorter sentences usually communicate better
than long ones.
Does that mean students should never write long sentences? Of course
not. In general it is better to have more short sentences
than long ones. Varying sentence lengths keeps writing with many
short sentences from sounding babyish.
When they write on a computer, students can easily change the format
of their text. Have students try putting each new, short sentence
on its own line by hitting the enter key after a period. Setting
each sentence on its own line reveals variations in sentence lengths.
Below I broke that original, rambling sentence into four sentences
of varying lengths.
The revision is much easier to read and much more interesting than
the original, isn't it? And aside from the sentence boundaries,
the original is almost untouched.
When students write on a computer, they can have the computer help
them find and fix sentences before they become grammar traps.
