Sentence Fluency

As we strive for better sentence fluency, I want you all to keep in mind the ways that it can be easily implemented in your writing.

Punctuation: the use of question marks, exclamation points, commas, periods, colons, semicolons, and dashes.

Sentence Length: small, medium, and large sentences.

Presentation of a sentence: not every sentence starts out the same way and redundant words are avoided.

Sentence fluency is a trait that will come and go. And it all depends on how conscious you are of it as you write. For example, if I know that adding in a short, 3-4 word sentence every now and then helps my writing, I'm going to make a point to add one. It's important!

Most of the time as we write we focus on getting our thoughts and ideas down on paper, and, as a result, the way we have constructed our sentences come across as very choppy. But what if we challenged ourselves to choose a few forms of punctuation (dashes, colons, and question marks) and a few short sentences and made sure we implemented them each time we write --and correctly at that.

At the end of the day, sentence fluency will be what you make it to be. It's a matter of sincerely caring how well you write and using the plethora of punctuation utensils available to you. You never know, you may just end up creating something you never thought you could before.

Use the following link as clarification of the proper use of punctuation marks. Once you have studied the given punctuation marks, construct a blog entry that demonstrates your understanding of them.

Punctuation Tips

An Introduction to Blogging

Class --

As we get into the swing of things and incorporate blogging into our classroom, I would like to do a brief introduction and then send you on your way to constructing your first blog.

I've stated that I see this as a very useful tool that is rich in technology --one that will help you all specifically with becoming more competent writers. I hope you look upon the idea of this with ease of mind. Like I said, I'm meeting you in the middle and bringing technology (something that your lives are enriched with) closer to you, and, in turn, you will use blogging as a learning tool.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of educationally-rich benefits from blogging:

• It's interactive (responding and providing feedback to fellow classmates);
• It allows you to have a voice (or say) on how you feel about classroom related topics;
• It's a tool that is able to be personalized;
• It can be used to help motivate you to strive to become better writers; and
• It gives you an audience of someone other than your teacher, allowing you to become more conscious of your work.

With that said, let's really get off to a good start on your first blog post. I've discussed in length how great of a tool this can be. However, other than the blog survey I gave you all, you haven't really had a lot of time to reflect on the values that you want to get out of this.

For your first blog set some goals for yourself, what you hope to accomplish. The objective here is to get each and every one of you to become a better writer. But ask yourself the question: What specifically do I want to improve on?