[ High School and Self-Education Board ]
Posted by StaceyL in Canada on 18:16 Sep 5
In Reply to: Can I get some grading help (writing)? posted by Pamela
...and though I've used/ modified IEW over the years, I don't think that's enough to deal with the style aspect. I highly recommend the Sentence Composing applied grammar series which will have your students practise writing more mature sentence structures based on classic/ famous authors. That should help them emerge fom the "it is" or "there is" rut : ) (I've also heard on this board of another applied grammar series--I think it's called something like Grammar in Ten Minutes--which does much the same). I don't recall how much detail IEW goes into re teaching a well-structured paragraph, so you might want to find a program which really focuses on that, such as Put That in Writing. Also, although your daughters may have creative thoughts, they do not seem yet to be able to present them in a logically coherent manner--I see no evidence of their having written these paragraphs based on any sort of logical outline. Just doing that will make a hug difference in their writing.
I hope this isn't discouraging; rather,take heart that there *are * excellent tools out there which will make it possible for your children to transform their writing before you know it!