Writing with Appositives That Enrich Detail
This chapter explains how to teach students to write adjective clauses that weave details into sentences. The grammatical tool used to create an adjective clause, is the relative pronoun. Some common relative pronouns are who, whom, whose, which, and that. Anna teaches 10th grade in an urban high school. Anna relies on students' intuitive knowledge of language to recognize the quality added by the adjective clauses. She uses the contrasting sound of smooth versus choppy sentences to emphasize the value of adjective clauses and she capitalizes on the social aspect of sharing in small groups. Anna uses a game to encourage use of adjective clauses. She employs the 'human sentences' as strong visuals for teaching punctuation, with students holding up parts of sentences to determine whether they are essential or nonessential adjective clauses. Anna models her own editing methods aloud and she contrasts average writing with better writing, allowing students to observe differences.