Strategies to Improve Writing

Strategies To Improve Writing 

As part of the National Curriculum, your child will write in a variety of styles; ranging across fiction (imaginative stories or descriptions) and non fiction (writing reports or persuasive letters). In addition, they will be expected to use a range of punctuation marks, adverbs, prepositions and phrases to add detail and clarity to their writing. Children will become familiar with the features of different types of writing but some may find it more difficult to edit and improve their writing once they have completed it.

The following strategies support the development of editing skills. Individual sentences can be extended and developed by asking these questions: who, what, when, where, why?

 For example; 

 The boy ate his lunch. 

The who and what questions have already been answered. The sentence is extended further by answering when, where and why? 

 At midday, the boy ate his lunch in the park because he was very hungry. 

 The ISPACED mnemonic was originally designed as a strategy to vary sentence starts (see below) however, it can be used to support students to independently edit writing generally.

I - ing words. Use powerful verbs (action) words. Munching and crunching, the boy ate his lunch. 

S- similes. Similes describe and can be identified by the words as and like. Like a hungry lion, the boy ate his lunch. As hungry as a lion, the boy ate his lunch. 

P - preposition. State where the action takes place. In the park, the boy ate his lunch like a hungry lion. 

A - adverbs. Use -ly words to describe how something is done. Hungrily, the boy ate his lunch. 

C - connectives (joining words) Finally, the boy ate his lunch. 

E- ed words. Tired, the boy ate his lunch. 

D- drop in a phrase or clause. Add some extra information using commas or parenthesis (brackets). The boy (who had not eaten for hours and hours) ate his lunch, munching and crunching like a lion. 

Encouraging your child to read their writing through carefully, checking punctuation and adding any of the above elements will improve their writing.