Most writing teachers encourage students to draft freely, to get some ideas down on paper that they can work with. Most writing teachers know and preach that the real work of writing happens in the revision stage of the writing process.
The writing program we are using in our school district has a form called the "shaping sheet." On this form, students write each sentence of their drafted paragraph into a separate shape so that they can examine each one for revision.
If isolating sentences can help student authors examine their choices in sentence writing, then isolating words can help student authors examine their word choices, a very important trait of good writing, an activity that good writers engage in almost constantly, whether drafting or revising.
Two camps of educators hold very strong opinions about whether we should spend any class time on formal or traditional grammar lessons. Surely, students don't need to learn parts of speech, do they? How can the knowledge of parts of speech help our students improve their writing?
I believe that it can. I agree with critics of isolated grammar instruction, that students will be more engaged in learning grammar structures when the lessons are immediately useful for their efforts with composition. There are very easy ways to accomplish this.
After leading a lesson on any part of speech, ask students to underline, circle or highlight all the nouns (or pronouns, or adjectives, or whatever part of speech you have been learning) that they can find in their own draft. Ask them to notice how they used that particular part of speech. Just calling attention to one brick in the wall, so to speak, will focus the writer's attention on a word choice they might improve.
As the writing coach, you might ask them to make thoughtful decisions about the nouns they have used. Would a proper noun (a more specific name) give more information about a character or a place than the common noun they used?
Can the student writer identify the antecedent of every pronoun? Do those antecedents "agree" with the pronoun in number or gender, as Academic English requires?
Many writers dislike an overuse of adjectives. They assert that actions (verbs) convey images more effectively than lists of descriptors. The overuse of descriptors, adverbs or adjectives, sounds amateurish (even flowery) to seasoned readers and writers.
A look at his highlighted adjectives enables the young writer to analyze the effect of those adjectives on the reader. He or she may opt for one perfectly-chosen adjective rather than a list of trite descriptors. Maybe their draft has no descriptor, so the writer analyzes whether adding one or two will improve his or her composition, or not.
Speaking of verbs, asking your student writers to focus on this part of speech in every sentence can help their writing improve quickly. Verbs should be selected for connotation, as well as denotation, and for aptness, for perfect expression. Did that character "murmur", "croak", "spit", "whisper", or "sing" the words he spoke in the story? It matters.
Focusing on the use of one part of speech at a time is a valuable exercise for developing the writing trait called "word choice."
