I blanched and then squeezed my eyes shut, hoping the action would hint to my mouth to also stay closed. He had done it again! My son’s sentence, “Man, that was a close one!” was in response to “The Mayflower Mishap” in the U.S. History-Based Writing Lessons book. And this was not one of the creative units! As a former high school English teacher, I was flustered by his constant inclusion of colloquial language. His paragraphs sounded as if he were conversing casually with me instead of summarizing the source text. “So, then,” and “Crazy!” peppered every other line, and it had to stop. As Mr. Pudewa’s article “But it’s so . . . so . . . awkward!” coaches, “Select one skill to focus on.” During those early years, I gathered my resources and found that I needed to look at audience, word choice, and sentence openers in order to focus on bending my son’s writing voice toward a more formal tone.
In her blog post “Black Tie or Blue Jeans? Formal versus Informal Language” Janet Spitler agrees when she states, “Unfortunately, the majority of Americans are notoriously casual in their speech and dress.” She recommends that teachers have students go through a quick activity, writing a paragraph to be read by a kindergarten student and then rewriting it so that it can be read by the principal of the school. She notes that from this activity, students begin to see that “The audience affects vocabulary choice as well as sentence length and structure.” My son and I read over different types of communication. We enjoyed looking back at a favorite Amelia Bedelia book and then reading a cover letter his father had used for a resume. As we perused each selection, we noted the differences and then set to work determining his audience for the next assignment.
Vocabulary or word choice is also key when seeking to formalize writing tone. In Episode 190 of our Arts of Language podcast, our Ask Andrew Anything series finds Andrew Pudewa answering a question about a writer’s voice (timestamp 2:30). He shares that in order to choose the best words, we must give the student more words! This is achieved by a language-rich atmosphere full of read-alouds and poetry. By hearing great works of literature, students will have a fuller vocabulary from which to choose. Andrew’s second call to action is to give more words for students to access. This point calls for helpful word lists, which IEW loves to incorporate in our student books and on our Portable Walls™. Our dining room table had the Portable Walls up and ready so that my son could easily find a helpful synonym or dress-up in order to avoid adding slang. He understood that he needed to spend a bit more time and be intentional with crafting each sentence, so it became somewhat of a game for him. We should fill our student’s toolboxes with lots of options for expression as they seek to create a sentence fitting for the assignment and its audience.
In that same episode, Andrew mentioned the last key tool in our ever growing arsenal against conversational writing: sentence openers! In “Perfecting Style with Time and Practice,” Heidi Thomas defines sentence openers as “descriptive words, phrases, and clauses used to open a sentence.” She then includes a paragraph written with and without sentence openers. One can quickly see the variety of emphasis and rhythm that sentence openers add. This stylistic technique was so helpful for my son. We took his sentence “Man, that was a close one!” and added a #3 -ly sentence opener instead. He noted that “Gratefully Goodman Highland clambered back into the Mayflower, knowing he had experienced a close call” allowed him to formally summarize the material while he still added his own creative flare. If he ever decided to turn this anecdote into a short story, his original sentence would be great dialogue. By teaching our students to add dress-ups, sentence openers, and decorations, we are giving them a task for which they are equipped and can be creative. As such, they will not be as inclined to chat through their paragraph.
Conversational writing has become a ubiquitous issue for the current generation as incomplete, non-punctuated texting has become their main form of communication and the word “like” is used as a conjunction, expletive, or interjection—all for emphasis. In her blog post, Janet Spitler concedes that conversational tone does have its place but should be reserved for friends, family, co-workers, and social media. However, IEW’s goal in teaching writing is to prepare students for communicating in written form—and for some, college-level writing. My son later finished his HVAC diploma at our local community college and excelled in his English 111 class. His professor also had some banned words and hinted at different ways to open sentences. I loved seeing IEW methods reinforced even though they were given different names. In our “Where are they now?” series of blog posts, Nicole Woolley describes how her IEW toolbox was key to helping her earn a business degree where she did not write many papers but composed a lot of emails and reports.
Encourage your students to pause conversational language since academic writing requires a formal tone, which can be achieved with a focus on one’s audience, word choices, and the addition of sentence openers.
by Katie Eades
