Teaching Grammar: What Really Works (2010)

Part II. Embedding Grammar in Writing Instruction

Chapter 9. Writing with Appositives That Enrich Detail: A Three-Day Lesson Series Embedded in the Writing Process

Writing with Appositives That Enrich Detail

A Three-Day Lesson Series Embedded in the Writing Process

Our students’ writing often sounds choppy because students compose sentence-by-sentence as details occur to them. By teaching them appositives, we can help them embed details in their sentences.

Here are some typical student sentences that need revision:

1.I like to take care of my dog. She is a golden Labrador puppy.

2.Riding my bike is my favorite activity. It is a Trek racer.

Here’s how students can edit those choppy sentences by using appositives:

1.I like to take care of my dog, a golden Labrador puppy.

2.Riding my bike, a Trek racer, is my favorite activity.

Will they have a hard time incorporating appositives? Absolutely not! After all, they already point out details using appositives—they simply don’t recognize they’re doing it. For example, a sixth-grader who shows you a photo of her friends at the beach might say, “Here’s Sarah, my best friend, and here’s Tommy, a guy I know from fifth grade, and here’s Dinah, my little sister.”; Her conversation includes three appositives without a bit of formal training. So in this chapter on appositives, you will see how you can use the natural language of your students in lessons that bring appositives into their written work.

Teaching Procedure

Hermania teaches in an urban sixth-grade classroom. Her students are writing about their family members as part of a family-tree project, and later they’ll write short stories. She’d like them to gain confidence using appositives to add detail in their descriptions of people and places, so she begins with some easy activities that the students can do in groups. Once they’ve begun to understand the concept, she’ll move to more independent projects.

Day One: Introducing Appositives

On the board Hermania writes sentences about five characters in The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993), the novel that her students are reading:

1.Jonas is an inquisitive boy.

2.Jonas can no longer share ideas with Asher.

3.He loves his sister, but he cannot confide in her.

4.Jonas’s father disappoints his son.

5.He needs advice from the Giver.

She pairs up her students and distributes ten sheets of paper, each one bearing a descriptive noun phrase:

♦A wise man

♦An adorable girl with braids

♦A respected nursery-school principal

♦A fun-loving boy

♦The book’s main character

♦A well-known superhero

♦A great athlete

♦A macho movie star

♦A fabulous singer

♦A good teacher

“Our game,” she begins, “is to find a way to insert the words on some of the papers you’re holding into these sentences about characters in The Giver. There’s a prize at the end of today’s class for one lucky pair. Now, who has words on the sheet that fit correctly with the first sentence on the board: Jonas is an inquisitive boy.”

Here Hermania engages her game-loving students in a sentence-expansion activity in which they can succeed immediately. Using the phrases they received, Kim and Shiralee hold up their sheet, which reads “the book’s main character.” She has them come forward with their phrase and write it above the spot where they think it would sound appropriate:

*Jonas the book’s main character is an inquisitive boy.

“That’s great!” she tells the class. “The same basic sentence now contains a lot more information: Jonas, the book’s main character, is an inquisitive boy. It sounds smoother as one longer sentence than it would in two separate sentences.” As soon as she finishes, she looks at the sentence and wonders, “Do you think this revised sentence needs commas, or can we insert this new information without adding commas?”

The students think about the comma question, a little worried about making a mistake. Rodney, however, follows what his ear tells him about the sound of the sentence and suggests commas before and after the added phrase. Hermania asks the others if they agree with Rodney—that they pause before and after those added words when they say the sentence—and one by one they nod in agreement.

“Yes, when we add this sort of extra information to a sentence, we put commas before and after it to help the reader keep it separate. The commas tell the reader that it is extra information—not essential information, which is information you need to know, but extra—nonessential.”

This is the first of many times that Hermania will use the term “nonessential” with her students, preparing for the punctuation rule that nonessential elements are normally separated from an independent clause by commas. If your students don’t understand the word essential (many don’t), you may take a minute here to explain it—and its antonym, nonessential—to them.

Pair by pair, the students add their noun phrases to the sentences on the board, giving everyone a chance to hear the repeated use of appositive phrases and observe the need to insert commas. Hermania tells the second pair of students that there is a name for the phrase they are writing, an “appositive phrase.”

As more students come forward, she can use that terminology repeatedly and ask the students to use their “writers’ language”: “Tell me which words make up your appositive phrase and what job they do in the sentence,” she urges. They answer with words like, “My appositive is a wise man, and it gives more information about the Giver in the sentence, He needs advice from the Giver, a wise man.”

Hermania has intentionally distributed five extra phrases that do not fit The Giver sentences and asks the remaining pairs of students to think of a sentence where their noun phrases will fit in. James waves his hand with an idea and calls out, “My sign has the words a great singer. I could use them in the sentence Beyonce, a great singer, has won three Grammy awards.”

“That’s perfect, James. Does everyone see how James uses the appositive a great singer to add more information about Beyonce?” The other students create sentences in which they can use their noun phrases, too. By the time the class ends, ten sentences appear on the board. You’ll notice how Hermania gradually shifts the responsibility to her students, having them create their own sentences after she introduces and discusses model sentences.

As homework, Hermania asks her students to choose a TV program or movie and write three sentences about its characters. In each sentence they must use an appositive as they have done in class. She sends them out with two sample sentences as models for theirs:

Ms. Rodriguez, my English teacher, asked me to do homework about appositives.

I need to write three sentences about characters in The Simpsons, one of my favorite TV programs.

Before her class ends, Hermania draws a number from a bowl containing ten numbers and announces, “The prize today goes to the seventh pair!” She has used the spirit of competition to pull the lesson to a close. Her students leave with an introduction to appositives—a new grammatical technique for them. They have learned new terminology, a sense of correct punctuation, and have a positive attitude about—of all things—grammar!

Day Two: Writing and Punctuating Appositives

When the students enter their classroom, the sentences the class wrote about The Giver are on the board. Hermania plans to have her students share their homework sentences containing appositives in small groups, but she wants to review the purpose and structure of the appositive phrase, as well as the punctuation, before they begin that independent work. She suspects that their one-day introduction to this technique won’t have been enough for everyone to feel secure about incorporating appositives into their writing.

“What do all the appositives that we wrote in these sentences yesterday seem to have in common?” she asks.

“They all have commas around them,” Peter observes.

“They kind of tell you more stuff about the word they describe,” adds Maria.

“They mostly seem short,” Juan offers.

“You’ve made some good observations. Yes, they all have commas because every one of them is extra information about the noun phrase they describe. Remember what we called this extra information yesterday—it’s nonessential because it’s not something essential, or something you need to know. Because we do not need to know those words to understand the sentence, we separate those words with commas. And they squeeze more information into a sentence, just like Maria said.

“Actually, most of them are three or four words long, but we could make them much longer by adding little phrases to them, so we need to know that sometimes writers make then longer. If we add several phrases to the sentence about Jonas’s father, it might grow to be twelve words!”

Hermania writes:

Jonas’s father, a respected nursery-school principal in charge of all of the new babies, disappointed his son.

“In this case,” Hermania says, “the appositive squeezes a lot of information into the original sentence. I want you to use your understanding of appositive phrases. Now, in groups of three, read your homework sentences to each other, checking your appositives. Select one of your stories to write on the transparency. I’ll walk around to answer any questions.”

Hermania adds a social aspect to this grammar lesson with small-group sharing, which students enjoy. In addition, small groups limit the risk that shy students may feel about sharing work with the entire class. Even more important, group members learn from each other. The groups’ efforts generate authentic examples from which to study appositives—much more relevant to the students than worksheets!

After the small-group sessions, the whole class convenes, and Hermania uses her overhead projector to show several sets of student-written examples. She circles appositives as the children read them aloud and draws arrows that point to the commas separating the appositive phrases from the independent clauses. The colors she uses intrigue the students, and her drawing of a hot-air balloon lifting the nonessential appositive up, out of the sentence, is a helpful metaphor for the job of commas—separating the appositive from the rest of the sentence.

Hermania notices that Rick’s example is an adjective clause, beginning with the words “who is ...,” not an appositive. Hermania expected that someone will make this sort of substitution, and she uses this opportunity to illustrate the difference for her students without criticizing the writer for what is actually an excellent sentence. When Rick reads his sentences, she says, “You’ve written an excellent sentence, Rick, but it’s the sort of sentence we’ll study later in the year. It has an adjective clause, not an appositive, because you’ve included the words who is in it.” On the board she illustrates the difference, so it is clear:

Captain Martin, who is a brave police officer, has to take a lot of risks.
(adjective clause)

Captain Martin, a brave police officer, has to take a lot of risks.
(appositive)

“Both of the sentences tell us the same thing,” she notes. “They simply use two different grammatical styles. We’re now writing with the appositive, but soon we’ll be starting the type you used, the adjective clause. I hope all of you see that the appositive is a noun phrase that tells more about the noun it follows. In our last example, it told us about Captain Martin.”

It seems amazing that these students can use appositives in their writing after a mere two days of study. But it’s realistic: We’ve learned that writers learn more efficiently when they work with their own thoughts than they do from identifying words or filling in blanks on worksheets.

For homework, Hermania asks students to look through their novel, The Giver, finding places where the author, Lois Lowry, uses appositives to add extra information. They need to bring three example sentences to class the next day. The more her students recognize that they can write with the same grammatical constructions as published authors, the prouder they feel.

Day Three: Making Connections to Literature and Moving Appositives

Hermania distributes strips of construction paper today and asks the students to write out one of the sentences containing an appositive that they found in The Giver. They are going to read these sentences aloud and display them on the wall.

Afterward, she asks them to decide on several sentences they like and to write them on the page in their notebook where they keep the gem sentences they discover in their reading. Their sentence collection raises their consciousness of artistic wording. Hermania’s students often come to her excited about the language they discover.

Hermania plans to offer one more technique with the appositives: the placement of an appositive in front of a noun phrase, instead of directly after it. “What would you think of my sentence if I wrote my appositive differently than we did earlier this week? Notice where I place the appositive in this sentence.” She writes on the board:

A disillusioned youngster, Jonas trudged back to his home and asked his father and mother, “Do you love me?”

“Why might someone write the sentence this way, rather than the way we originally learned?” She writes:

Jonas, a disillusioned youngster, trudged back to his home and asked his father and mother, “Do you love me?”

It takes a few guesses before someone suggests that the first way is different from ordinary writing: Maybe the author simply wanted to attract attention or make an impression on the reader. “Yes,” Hermania explains, “variation—doing something different and unique—is valued in writing, just like it is in art, in sports, in many places. Maybe the writer wants this detail to stand out in the reader’s mind. I wonder if any of the sentences you wrote about your TV characters would sound good to you if you placed your appositive before the noun phrase instead of after it.”

Everyone experiments with the technique of the appositive before the noun, listening to the change in the sentence. Most likely, only a few students will want to experiment with the unusual style of the appositive in their own writing, but Hermania presents the option for those who are adventurous with language.

When these students embark on their family stories, they will incorporate appositives to add extra information and avoid short, choppy sentences. During the editing process, their teacher can discuss using appositives to combine sentences since she and the students share a common language about writing techniques. It’s exciting to imagine talking together about appositives as easily as talking about TV shows. These students are learning the craft of the writer, plus the vocabulary of language. How could we ever do without it?

Will this class discuss essential and nonessential appositives or appositives that don’t require commas? No! The issue of essential versus nonessential requires careful reasoning that many sixth graders find difficult. But you’ll find that discussion covered later in our chapter on adjective clauses.

Figure 9.1 Chapter 9 Overview Chart