Unit 8 · Writing

Read these two sentences. "Recess is a part of the school day." "Recess should be twenty minutes longer." The first one is just true. Nobody would argue with it. The second one takes a side. Someone could disagree. That second sentence is a claim. A claim is an opinion you are ready to defend.

In an opinion paragraph, the claim goes first. It is the topic sentence, the sentence that tells the reader what the whole paragraph is about. A good topic sentence is short, clear and bold. It does not say "I kind of think maybe." It says "Our school should start a garden."

Try this test on your own topic sentence. Could someone argue against it? If yes, it is a claim. If no, it is only a fact. "Dogs are animals" is a fact. "Dogs make better pets than cats" is a claim. Facts belong later, as proof. The claim comes first.

A claim by itself is like a table top with no legs. It falls over. "Recess should be longer." Why? The answers to why are the reasons, and they are the legs. Daniela’s first reason was "because it is fun." That is a real reason, but it is weak. A principal does not plan the day around fun.

A strong reason is one your reader would care about. Daniela’s reader was the principal. Principals care about learning, health and safety. So her strong reasons were: kids need sixty minutes of movement a day, the class only gets ten minutes outside, and a class that has moved learns faster. Each reason is something the principal already wants.

Aim for two or three reasons. One reason is thin. Six reasons make a list, not a paragraph. Pick the strongest and put them in order. Many writers save the best reason for last, so it is the one the reader remembers.

Here is a reason: "Our class learns better after recess." It sounds good, but a reader might shrug. Now add this: "Last Tuesday, after twenty minutes outside, we finished the math page in ten minutes. On Wednesday, with no recess, it took twenty-five." Now the reader can see it. That is an example.

An example is a specific fact, number, story or moment. Specific means exact: not "a lot of kids" but "eighteen of twenty-four kids." Not "one time" but "last Tuesday." Examples come from things you saw, counted, read or asked someone about. Daniela asked the gym teacher and counted minutes with a clock.

Each reason should get at least one example. Write the reason, then write the example right after it. The reason is the rule; the example is the proof. Together they make a pair the reader can trust.

Read this. "Recess should be longer. Kids need to move. The class only gets ten minutes outside." The ideas are there, but the sentences sit like bricks with no mortar. Now read it again. "Recess should be longer because kids need to move. For example, our class only gets ten minutes outside." The words because and for example are the mortar.

These are linking words. Each one tells the reader what kind of idea is coming. Because and since introduce a reason. For example and for instance introduce an example. Also, another and in addition add one more reason. Therefore, so and that is why introduce a result or a closing.

Use linking words on purpose, not everywhere. One per new idea is enough. If every sentence starts with also, the paragraph sounds like a list. Mix them, and your reader can follow the path from claim to reasons to closing without getting lost.

A paragraph without a closing sentence feels like a song that stops in the middle. The reader waits for more. The closing sentence is the last sentence, and it does two jobs. First, it says the claim again in new words. Second, it leaves the reader with a feeling or a thought to carry away.

Daniela’s claim was "Recess should be twenty minutes longer." Her closing sentence was "Give us those twenty minutes, and you will get a calmer, healthier, smarter fourth grade." Same idea, new words, and a picture of what the reader gains. Notice that she did not just copy her topic sentence.

Two ways to close. You can restate the claim with a linking word: "That is why our school needs a garden." Or you can call the reader to act: "Plant the garden this spring." Do not add a brand new reason at the end. New reasons belong in the middle; the end is for landing.

Picture a builder who starts nailing boards before drawing a plan. The house comes out crooked. Writers who start drafting with no plan get crooked paragraphs: a reason with no example, or a closing that forgets the claim. So before you draft, make a plan. It takes five minutes and saves twenty.

A plan for an opinion paragraph can be a simple box chart. Top box: the claim. Under it, two or three boxes, one per reason. Under each reason, a line for its example. Bottom box: the closing. Daniela filled hers in with short phrases, not full sentences: "60 min movement, gym teacher said."

When the plan is full, look at it before you write. Is any reason weak? Cut it. Does a reason have no example? Find one or cut it. Is the best reason last? Move it. Fixing the plan is easy. Fixing a finished paragraph is hard. Then draft: turn each box into one or two full sentences.

"This book was good" is not a claim anyone can use. Good how? For whom? A real book opinion sounds like this: "Third graders who like animals should read this book." Or: "The ending of this book is not fair to the main character." Now there is something to argue.

For a book opinion, your examples come from inside the book. A reason might be "The main character is brave." The example is a moment: "When the barn catches fire, she runs back in for the calf." Point to a page or a scene. Readers trust you more when you show that you really read it.

You can also give the reader of your opinion a job. Say who should read the book and why. Say whether you would read it again. Say what you wished the author had done. Those are all claims. Back each one with a scene, and you have a book review a friend could actually use.

Daniela wrote: "Some people say longer recess means less learning time. But a calm class learns more in forty minutes than a wiggly class learns in fifty." She named the other side, the opinion that disagrees with hers. Then she answered it. This is one of the strongest moves an opinion writer can make.

Why does it help? Because your reader is already thinking of the other side. The principal was going to think "but learning time" the moment she read the claim. If Daniela says it first, the principal sees that Daniela thought hard. If Daniela hides it, the principal thinks Daniela never noticed.

The shape is simple. "Some people think ____. But ____." Give the other side a fair sentence, not a silly one. Then answer it with a reason or an example. Put it near the end, just before your closing. One other-side sentence and one answer is enough for a paragraph.

An opinion paragraph in a notebook changes nothing. The same paragraph in a letter to the principal might change the schedule. A letter has a real audience, the person who will read it. When you know your audience, you choose your reasons, your words and your tone for that one person.

A friendly letter has parts. The date at the top. A greeting: "Dear Dr. Alvarez,". The body, which is your opinion paragraph. A closing word like "Sincerely," and your name. Daniela added one more thing at the end of the body: a clear request. "Please consider adding twenty minutes to fourth-grade recess this spring."

Tone matters. Tone is how your words sound to the reader. "Recess is way too short and it is not fair" sounds like complaining. "Our class would learn more with twenty more minutes outside" sounds like a person with a plan. Polite and specific beats loud every time. Then proofread it, sign it and send it.

Theo’s first draft covered a whole day in six sentences. Wake up, play, come in, drink cocoa. That is a list, and a list is not a story. A story needs a camera that stops and holds still. Ms. Okafor told him to find the smallest part that mattered. He found ten seconds: the fort falling in.

Writers call this a small moment. It is one event that took a few minutes, or even a few seconds. The bus pulling away without you. The moment your dog first saw snow. The second the cake fell over. Small moments make better stories because you can slow down and show every detail.

To find yours, start with a big memory. Then ask: what is the one part I would tell a friend first? That is the moment. Everything else is background. You can mention the rest in a sentence, but the moment gets the whole page.

Compare two first lines. "I woke up. It was a snow day." And: "Eli lifted the last block over his head. ’Don’t,’ I said. He did." The first one could begin a thousand stories. The second one makes you ask what happens next. That pull is called a hook.

Three kinds of hooks work well for a small moment. Start with action: someone is already doing something. Start with talk: a line of dialogue, the words a person says. Start with a sound or a picture: "Whump. Then silence, then boots." Any of these drops the reader into the moment instead of walking them to it.

What does not work? Starting at the start of the day. Starting with "I am going to tell you about." Starting with the weather unless the weather is the story. Try this: write your moment, then cut the first two sentences. Often the real hook was hiding in sentence three.

"It was fun" tells. "Eli’s boots stuck out of the pile and his muffled voice said, ’I’m okay! I’m okay!’" shows. The difference is detail. Theo’s second draft gave the reader things to hear, see and feel. Those are called sensory details: details that use the five senses of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.

You do not need all five in every paragraph. Pick the two or three that were strongest in the moment. For the fort, it was sound (whump, muffled voice) and touch (cold inside the gloves). Ask yourself: what did I hear? What did my hands feel? What could I smell? Write the honest answer.

Dialogue is another way to show. When Eli says "I’m okay!" twice, we learn he is scared and also fine, and we learn it faster than if Theo explained it. Keep dialogue short and real. People do not give speeches in a snow fort. Two or three lines of talk in a small moment is usually plenty.

Theo’s first draft ended with "The end." His second ended with the brothers lying in the wreck of the fort, laughing too hard to stand up. The first ending stops. The second one lands. It leaves the reader with the feeling the whole story was building toward.

Three ways to land a small moment. End with a picture: the last thing you saw. End with a line of talk: the last thing someone said. End with a thought: what you knew or felt right then, in one honest sentence. "We never rebuilt the fort. We did not need to." Any of these gives the story a place to rest.

What to avoid. Do not race to bedtime: "Then we went in and ate and went to sleep." Do not explain the lesson: "And that is why you should listen to your brother." Trust the reader. If you showed the moment well, they already feel it. Stop one sentence sooner than you think you should.

A story shows one moment. An informative piece explains a topic so a reader learns something true. Both are true writing, but they work differently. The story slows down. The informative piece organizes. Its first job is to tell the reader the topic in a sentence or two: "Monarch butterflies fly thousands of miles every fall, and Illinois is on their road."

The second job is grouping. Imagine you have twelve facts about monarchs on sticky notes. Some are about the wings. Some are about the trip south. Some are about milkweed. Put the wing facts together, the trip facts together, the food facts together. Each group becomes a paragraph. A reader can follow three groups; a reader cannot follow twelve loose facts.

Order the groups so they make sense. Often it is what a thing is, then what it does, then why it matters. The introduction names the topic and hints at the groups. "Monarchs have amazing wings. They make an incredible trip. They need one plant to survive." Now the reader knows the map before the trip.

Open a true book about volcanoes. You do not read every page. You look at the headings, the short bold titles above each part, and jump to the one you want. When you write informative text, give your reader the same help. Each group of facts gets a heading that says what it is about: "The Long Trip South."

A picture with a caption can carry a fact faster than a paragraph. A map with an arrow from Illinois to Mexico shows the monarch’s trip in one look. A labeled drawing of a wing shows the scales. Draw it or find it. Then write a caption. That is one sentence that tells what the picture shows.

Every topic has words the reader might not know. Milkweed. Migration. Do not skip them and do not just use them. Define them: give the meaning in plain words the first time the word appears. "Monarchs migrate, which means they travel a long way when the seasons change." A defined word is a gift to a reader who was about to get lost.

Try to make a paper airplane from these directions: "Fold it and throw it." You cannot. A how-to is informative writing that teaches a reader to do something. It only works if the steps are complete and in order. Start with a title that says the job: "How to Make a Paper Airplane That Flies Straight."

Next comes a list of what you need: one sheet of paper, a flat table. Then the steps, numbered. Each step is one action, starting with a verb: "1. Fold the paper in half the long way. 2. Open it flat again." Words like first, next, then, after that and finally help the reader keep their place.

The test of a how-to is simple. Give it to someone who has never done the thing, and watch them. Where do they stop and ask? That step is missing something. Where do they do it wrong? That step is unclear. Fix those spots. A how-to is finished when a stranger can follow it without asking you anything.

Priya wants to write about the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She reads two books and a museum website. She does not copy sentences. She takes notes in her own words, short phrases on index cards: "started Oct 8, 1871." "burned about 3 days." "around 300 people died." "city rebuilt with brick and stone." Each card also says which book or site it came from.

Then she groups the cards, just like sticky notes. One pile: how it started and spread. One pile: what was lost. One pile: how the city rebuilt. Each pile becomes a paragraph. She turns each phrase into a full sentence in her own words. Because the notes were already hers, the paragraphs are hers too.

At the end she lists her sources, the places the facts came from. Two reasons. First, it is honest: those writers did the work of finding the facts. Second, a reader who wants more knows where to look. Even a short list, "Books I used," with titles and authors, does the job in fourth grade.

Suppose the question is "How does the tortoise feel at the start of the race?" You could answer "She feels confident." Good, but a reader might ask how you know. So you add the proof: "When the hare laughs at her, she does not argue. She just says, ’Let us race.’" That proof from the text is evidence.

The pattern has three parts. Make your point. Give the evidence, either a short quote in quotation marks or a detail in your own words. Then explain how the evidence proves the point: "Someone who is nervous would argue or back down. She does neither." Point, evidence, explain. Many teachers call it P-E-E.

Choose evidence that really fits. Not every detail proves every point. If your point is that the hare is careless, the fact that he is fast does not help. The fact that he naps in the middle of a race does. Pick the detail that makes your reader nod.

Theo gave the fort’s fall a whole paragraph and the walk home one sentence. That is pacing: choosing how much space each part gets. Slow down where the moment matters and speed up where it does not. In informative writing, pacing works the same way. The important group of facts gets the most room. The small one gets the least.

Transitions are the words that move a reader between parts. In a story, they handle time. A moment later. By the time we got inside. The next morning. In informative writing, they handle ideas. Another reason. In addition. On the other hand. Finally. A transition is a hand on the reader’s back saying this way.

Read your draft and mark every place the scene, time or idea changes. Is there a transition there? If a reader could get lost, add one. If the transition is doing nothing, cut it. Then check pacing: is the best part the biggest part? If the boring part is longest, cut it down and give the room to the moment that matters.

Mr. Nguyen’s first draft took ninety seconds and looked like a mess. That is normal. A draft is a version of a piece of writing, and the first one is only for getting the idea onto the page before it escapes. Nobody expects it to be good. Its only job is to exist.

Many students stop after one draft and hand it in. That is like a builder who nails up the boards and never comes back to paint. The writing process has more steps: plan, draft, revise, edit, share. Revising and editing are where a rough paragraph becomes one a reader can trust.

Here is the mindset. When you finish a draft, do not ask "Am I done?" Ask "What does this need next?" Sometimes the answer is bigger ideas. Sometimes it is stronger words. Sometimes it is just a missing period. Every draft is a step, and each step has its own job.

Look at what happened between draft one and draft two. "It was bad" disappeared. The open gate and the crying sister appeared. The finding at the park moved to the end where it belonged. Those changes are revising: changing the ideas, details and order, not the spelling. Revising happens with a big view of the whole piece.

There are four revising moves. Add: put in a detail, a reason or an example the reader needs. Cut: take out what is boring, repeated or off topic. Move: put a sentence where it makes more sense, like the best reason last. Replace: swap a vague idea for a specific one, like "it was bad" for "my sister cried."

To revise, read the whole draft once without a pencil. Then ask four questions. What is missing? What is not needed? What is in the wrong place? What is vague? Each question matches one move. Mark the spot, make the change, and read the whole thing again. One good revising pass beats ten drafts of fiddling.

"It’s good." "I liked it." Those are nice to hear, but they do not help a writer revise. Useful feedback is specific. "I could really see the empty yard" tells the writer what is working. "I got confused about where you were when you found him" tells the writer what to fix. A peer, a classmate reading your work, can give both.

A simple shape for feedback. First, say one thing that worked and point to the exact sentence. Second, ask one honest question: "How long did you look?" or "What did your sister say?" A question is better than a command, because the writer gets to decide how to answer it on the page.

Two rules for the writer. Listen without arguing. If a reader was confused, they were confused; explaining it out loud does not fix the page. And you do not have to take every suggestion. Feedback tells you where a reader stumbled. You decide how to fix it. It is still your writing.

"We went to the park really fast." Now: "We sprinted to the park." The second one is shorter and you can see it. Went is a weak verb; it could mean anything. Sprinted is a strong verb; it tells you exactly how. Strong verbs let you cut props like really and very, because the verb already carries the picture.

The same goes for nouns, the words for people, places and things. "The dog" could be any dog. "Biscuit" is one dog. "A bird" could be anything with feathers. "A cardinal" is red and you can see it. An exact noun makes a picture without needing a pile of describing words in front of it.

Try this on your draft. Circle every went, got, said, did, thing and stuff. For each one, ask: what exactly? Went how? Got what? Said in what voice? Replace what you can. Do not replace all of them; "said" is fine most of the time. But one sprinted where you had went can wake up a whole paragraph.

Read this out loud. "I saw the gate. It was open. The yard was empty. Biscuit was gone. I ran inside. I yelled for my mom." Every sentence is short. Every one starts with I. It sounds like a drum with one beat. Now: "When I saw the open gate and the empty yard, my stomach dropped. Biscuit was gone." Long, then short. The short one hits harder because of the long one before it.

That is sentence variety: mixing sentence lengths and sentence starts. Short sentences are for punch. Long sentences are for building up or slowing down. Starts can be a name, a time word, an action or a place: "That night," "Under the porch," "Screaming his name," "Biscuit."

Two easy fixes. If you have three short sentences in a row, combine two with and, but, when or because. If every sentence starts the same way, move a phrase to the front of one of them. Then read it aloud again. You will hear the rhythm change.

Revising is done. Now comes editing: fixing the mechanics so the reader is never distracted. Start with capital letters. Every sentence begins with one. Every name of a person, a pet, a city, a street, a day or a month gets one: Biscuit, Chicago, Tuesday, March. The word I is always a capital, even in the middle.

Now the series comma. A series is a list of three or more things in a sentence. "We searched the yard the alley the park and the school." Read that out loud; the places run together. Put a comma between each item: "We searched the yard, the alley, the park, and the school." The comma before and is called the serial comma. Many schools teach it; some newspapers skip it. Either way, be consistent.

Edit with a pencil, one rule at a time. First pass: capitals only. Second pass: commas in lists only. Trying to catch everything at once means missing half of it. Slow, single-rule passes catch what a fast read never sees.

Mr. Nguyen’s sister yelled something in the yard. On the page it looks like this: "Biscuit!" she yelled. "Where are you?" The marks around her words are quotation marks. They tell the reader: these are the exact words that came out of her mouth. Words outside the marks, like she yelled, are the writer’s.

Three rules make dialogue clean. First, the quotation marks wrap only the spoken words. Second, the punctuation at the end of the spoken words goes inside the closing mark: "I’m okay," he said. Notice the comma, not a period, when the sentence keeps going with he said. Third, a new speaker gets a new line. When the sister stops and Mom starts, start a new paragraph.

The speech tag is the part like she yelled or he said. It can come before or after the words. "We’ll find him," Mom said. Or: Mom said, "We’ll find him." Either way there is a comma between the tag and the words. If a question mark or exclamation point ends the speech, it replaces the comma: "Where?" she asked.

Look at the small mark in don’t and in Biscuit’s. It is an apostrophe, and it does two different jobs. In don’t, it stands in for a missing letter: do not squeezed into one word, with the o gone. Words like that are contractions: can’t, I’m, she’s, we’ll, isn’t. The apostrophe goes exactly where the missing letters were.

In Biscuit’s collar, the apostrophe shows that the collar belongs to Biscuit. That is a possessive. Add an apostrophe and s to a name or a singular noun. My sister’s voice. The dog’s bowl. A plural noun that already ends in s is different. Put the apostrophe after the s. The dogs’ bowls means bowls for more than one dog.

The trap: its and it’s. It’s always means it is or it has: "It’s cold." Its, with no apostrophe, means belonging to it: "The dog wagged its tail." Test it by saying it is out loud. "The dog wagged it is tail" is wrong, so no apostrophe. And plain plurals never get one: two dogs, three parks, no apostrophe at all.

"Evrywhere" sat in Mr. Nguyen’s draft for three versions. He was not a bad speller; he was a fast drafter, and that is fine. Spelling gets fixed in editing. But you need strategies, ways to catch and fix words, because you will not always have a computer to underline them in red.

Strategy one: break the word into parts. Every-where. Un-believe-able. If you can spell the parts, you can spell the word. Strategy two: know the patterns. When a word ends in a silent e, drop the e before adding ing: hope, hoping. For words that end in y after a consonant, change y to i before adding es or ed: cry, cried. Patterns cover thousands of words.

Strategy three: keep a personal word list, the five or ten words you get wrong again and again. Check your draft against it every time. Strategy four: when you are not sure, circle the word and keep writing. Look it up in a dictionary or ask at the end. Never let one hard word stop the whole draft.

Your eyes cheat. They know what you meant to write, so they read the missing word as if it were there. Your ears do not cheat. Read this out loud: "We searched the yard the alley the park." You will run out of breath and hear the missing commas. Read a run-on aloud and you will hear where the period was supposed to be.

Reading aloud catches four things. Missing or doubled words. Sentences that go on too long. Sentences that all sound the same. And places where the meaning is unclear, because you will stumble there. When you stumble, mark it. Do not fix it yet. Finish the read, then go back to every mark.

Do it slowly, with your finger on the words. That way you read what is on the page, not what is in your head. Better yet, have a partner read your draft aloud to you. They do not know what you meant, so they read exactly what is there. Where they stumble is where your reader will stumble.

When the revising and editing are done, make a clean copy. Most classes type it. Typing has real benefits: the spelling checker underlines words to look at, you can move a sentence without erasing, and a reader can read it easily. But the checker is not your editor. It misses there for their and it’s for its. Your own editing passes still come first.

A final copy needs a title, your name and the date. Use one plain font, and put a space between paragraphs or indent the first line. Print it or save it with a clear file name, like snow-day-story-final. Keep your earlier drafts too. They show how far the piece came, and sometimes a cut sentence turns out to be worth putting back.

Then share it. Read it to the class. Post it on the wall. Put it in a class book, or send it to the person it was for. Writing is a message. A message that never reaches a reader is not finished. Mr. Nguyen’s four drafts stayed on the wall all year. Every student could see what a first draft looks like and what it can become.