Varying Sentence Lengths Variety is the spice of life… Christa Bosco

Click here to for an introduction to this presentation.

Contents 1. Sentence Length Variety Defined 2. Audio Model of Sentence Length Variety 3. Text Model of Sentence Length Variety 4. Graphing and Documenting Sentence Length Variety 5. Reflection Questions 6. “Add Four Take Four” Varying Length Editing Method 7. Follow-Up Assignment Click here to start!

Sentences of the same length can be very boring!

Make your sentences more interesting and more fluent by varying your sentence lengths.

Click on The Hunger Games for a read aloud containing varied sentence lengths. (4:46 minutes)

Click on the mockingjay to read the first page of The Hunger Games.

Using a section of text you choose from The Hunger Games, type up 10 sentences, one below the other. Use sized 10 font. Underneath it, create a graph depicting the lengths of the sentences by reducing the size to a sized 5 font. Click here for an example…

1. What do you notice about the sentence lengths? 2. What effect does it have on the overall fluency of the text? Answer these questions under your text graph.

Now that you’ve heard and seen an example of fluent text with a variety of sentence lengths, let’s look at how you’ve done on a piece of writing from your portfolio.

Using a piece of writing from your portfolio, repeat the previous exercise using 10 consecutive sentences. List them out and graph them accordingly. Under your analysis, write a reflection using the questions on slide 9.

Now that you’ve assessed your use of sentence variety, let’s talk about how to fix writing that has little variety.

Use the “Add 4, Take 4” method to give your writing more sentence length variety. Simply add four words to a sentence or take four words from a sentence to vary the lengths! four

For example… Sitting at Prim’s knees, guarding her, is the world’s ugliest cat. Sitting at Prim’s knees guarding her with fierce green eyes, is the world’s ugliest cat. four Guarding her, is the world’s ugliest cat. Text from The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins OR

Now you are prepared and knowledge able about the importance of sentence length variety. You are ready to edit your writing to create more fluency. Using the selection from your portfolio piece, revise and edit to create sentence variety. Type your edits under your previous work.