Writing

When you start a piece of writing, it is important to have a good opening sentence. Why? It is so your reader stays interested long enough to keep reading! Below are examples of ways to "hook" your readers' interest. Each is an example of a different way to begin a persuasive essay asking for a new pet.

When you are writing, you can add detail by describing. You can describe by using your senses. Use words that explain to others how something smells, tastes, sounds, feels, and looks.

Use Questions to Help you Come up with Details in Your Writing

Use the Question Matrix to help you get ideas for your writing. For example, say I am going to write about my weekend. I can choose a question from the A category:

What did I do?
- - - I played music.

Next, choose from the another columns:

Who did I play it with?
- - - I played it with my family.
When will we play for an audience?
- - - We will play for an audience when we get solid on our songs.
How might we get better?
- - - We might get better if we keep practicing each day.

Then, you can combine your ideas into one or more sentences.

Over the weekend, I played music with my family. As soon as we get better, we are going to play for an audience. I guess we had better keep practicing every day if we plan to get better!

Depending on how much you want to write, you can continue to ask yourself questions about your topic, and you can generate a lot of details!

Good writing is also organized. We can organize our ideas by using Transition Words.

Enumerate- to mention (a number of things) one by one

Enumeration and sequencing are similar. The difference is that:

in sequential structure there has to be an order
in an enumerative structure the order is not important.

Text Features can also help us organize our writing. They can also help us with our reading. Look at the list of text features below, and see how many you can find in books, magazines, or on websites.

Writer's Craft

Below is a chart that explains the different writing traits. When you are finished your writing, you can use this checklist to see if you have anything you need to add or change. Have fun writing!