Boost writers’ sentence fluency with specific strategies

writing

Boost writers’ sentence fluency with specific strategies

april 2, 2024

Sentence fluency is potentially the hardest trait to master. It’s more than just knowing how to write complete and grammatically correct sentences. Fluency requires a variety of sentences that flow together easily, smoothly, and musically.

STEP 1: Listen for fluency

In order to achieve that, students first must recognize great fluency in their reading.

• Make sure students can find simple vs. compound vs. complex sentences.
• Make sure they notice varied sentence beginnings, lengths, and types.
• Determine if students recognize how punctuation marks alter the sound of a sentence.
• Teach them to notice figurative language and how it adds a musical quality to the sentences (not to mention the additional phrases add length to the sentences).
• Have students read excerpts aloud noticing the word patterns created by alliteration and parallelism.

STEP 2: Revise for fluency

Once students are hearing great fluency, it’s time to move to step 2—Get them to revise their own writing to increase the fluency and readability. (NOTE: Let them work on focused revisions first. If students can’t apply the skills to a revision, they will not be able to apply it to a new writing. )

In her rold as sixth grade instructional coach at Perry Meridian Academy in Indianapolis, IN, Christy Gilva realized the importance of teaching students how to revise their sentences for fluency. Students were simply replacing weak word choice with stronger synonyms, thinking they were improving their sentence fluency. So she developed a mini-lesson series that targeted four different strategies for revising sentence fluency.

1. Sentence flipping
2. Using appositives
3. Sentence combining
4. Sentence padding

As she taught specific strategies for revising sentences, Christy found herself embedding grammar and conventions lessons. (Remember, sentence fluency and conventions are closely related.)

Round out a series of lessons on fluency by emphasizing sentence length. Although there may be nothing grammatically wrong with a series of sentences, they may just sound better stacked in short sentences or combined in a single longer one.

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