Teaching Grammar: What Really Works (2010)

Part II. Embedding Grammar in Writing Instruction

Chapter 11. Writing with Participial Phrases for Improved Elaboration: A Six-Day Lesson Series Embedded in the Writing Process

Over the years we’ve repeated the words “Show, don’t tell” more times than we can count. Early in our teaching careers, we posted “Show, don’t tell” signs on our classroom walls and marked that phrase over and over in red on our students’ papers—with little success.

If you’ve had a similar experience, don’t despair. Help is coming! In this chapter, we’ll share ways we’ve discovered to improve student descriptions with participial phrases that bring scenes to life.

Here are some sentences about a baseball game that contain participial phrases—that is, -ing phrases.

1.Gripping the bat, the nervous batter stood ready.

2.Leaning back and raising his arm in the air, the pitcher threw the ball.

3.The batter swung, making contact and sending the ball upward.

4.The young hero, puffing breathlessly, lodged his foot on third base.

The italicized participial phrases deepen the reader’s visual image of the game. They help to “show” instead of “tell,” which is what we want our writers to do. We’ve learned to help students enliven their descriptions by envisioning the physical motions of their characters and expressing them with participial phrases.

Teaching Procedure

Dan teaches ninth graders who read coming-of-age stories and then write their own personal narratives about growing up. For years he complained about the scarcity of detail in his students’ stories, but he lacked techniques that would teach his students how to provide deeper description.

This year, however, Dan is tapping into his students’ power of observation. He’ll use one student as an actor while the others behave like “human cameras,” recording specific details of movement.

Day One: Acting Out Participial Phrases

To help students become comfortable with participial phrases, Dan plans a game that’s similar to charades. First, however, he wants to demonstrate how students can use a participial phrase to combine two ideas. He points his outstretched arm to the clock and asks, “What action am I doing?” It’s important that his question asks for a verb in the answer. Participial phrases contain verbs that do the jobs of adjectives—describing someone or something.

He listens to the students who call out “pointing at the clock,” and he writes on the board, Mr. Brown is pointing at the clock. Then he asks, “Tell me what Mr. Brown does after that.”

“How about He says class is over?”

After writing that suggestion on the board, Dan asks students to combine the two sentences. He records the students’ responses:

Mr. Brown is pointing at the clock, and he says class is over.

While Mr. Brown is pointing at the clock, he says we have another half hour.

Mr. Brown, who is pointing at the clock, says class is over.

He predicted those answers—after all, he taught the compound sentence, the adverb clause, and the adjective clause earlier in the school year. But he urges the students to find an entirely new combination. They seem stumped this time, so, with raised arm, he dramatically draws an X through Mr. Brown is, leaving the remaining sentence:

Pointing at the clock, he [Mr. Brown] says class is over.

“Does everyone see how I eliminated Mr. Brown is and started the sentence with Pointing, which is an -ing verb? Could you do that with these three sets of sentences?” Everyone tries combining sentences that Dan has written on the board, using -ing verbs. Jesus, Tomas, and Tricia write their sentences next to Dan’s.

Original: Joe waved at his girlfriend. He walked toward his classroom.

Revision: Waving at his girlfriend, Joe walked toward his classroom.

Original: Sue bent over the fountain. She took a long drink of water.

Revision: Bending over the fountain, Sue took a long drink of water.

Original: Ron found a ten-dollar bill in his backpack. He pumped his fist with excitement.

Revision: Finding a ten-dollar bill in his backpack, Ron pumped his fist with excitement.

The way Dan scaffolds learning here—from his sample to their samples—builds his students’ confidence with the participial variation. He can now proceed with the game, in which two teams of students write participial phrases and independent clauses. The game activity will surprise his class. “You know, kids, I feel like playing a game today. Anyone mind that?” No objections. After three weeks of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1948), they are ready for a game.

On index cards Dan has previously written six acting moments. Here’s what his “game cards” say:

crawling on all fours

falling off a chair

zipping a backpack

unwrapping the candy

falling asleep in a chair

passing a note

Here are the rules of the game:

♦A student chooses a card from the stack on the teacher’s desk and acts out the words, just like in a game of charades.

♦Everyone on both teams guesses what the student is doing while one member of each team writes down the answer.

♦The first team to identify what the actor is doing wins three points. The other team’s correct guess earns two points.
(Notice that both groups acquire points.)

♦Then, both teams rush to write a sentence that starts with their participial (-mg) phrase on a strip of construction paper, following the model of sentences written earlier on the board. Once a team finishes writing its sentence, one of its members rings a bell.

♦The first team to ring the bell earns three points, and the second team earns two.

♦ Team members need to watch, write, rush, and ring. They all earn points by participating.

The game begins, complete with dry-erase boards, paper strips and bells. Of course, the activity works without those props, too.

Monica wants to be the guinea pig. She picks a card that says “unwrapping the candy” and starts tearing off the wrapper of the mini candy bar Dan hands her. He asks the students, “What is she doing?” and they rush to write down their answers. Dan records their answers on the board—“Unwrapping the candy” and “Tearing the wrapping paper”—which are both correct. Then both teams write a sentence about Monica, starting with their participial and adding an independent clause (or, as Dan has told his students, “another complete sentence”).

One team’s strip of paper reads Unwrapping her candy, Monica tries to sneak a bite before anyone notices. The other team’s strip reads Tearing the wrapping paper off her candy, Monica shows off to everyone.

Before the class ends, more volunteers participate. They learn to use the term “participial phrase,” which they associate with -ing verbs that describe nouns or pronouns the way adjectives normally do. Dan hangs their sentence strips around the room—participial-phrase writing samples for the next day.

Day Two: Moving Participial Phrases

Today students will observe how participial phrases are movable within a sentence. When the students enter the room, they see two sentences on the board:

Nina sees a new pen on the floor. She stoops to pick it up.

Dan begins, “Let’s start today by combining these sentences the way you did yesterday, with an -ing verb.”

The students study the sample sentences on the paper strips from the previous day. Marco wonders, “Can we say, Seeing a new pen on the floor, Nina stoops to pick it up?”

“Yes, in fact, writers often include more information for the reader in a sentence like you did by attaching an -ing verb phrase. Look at another pair of sentences:

Nina drops her books on her desk. She gets comfortable.

This time more students volunteer. Dan’s list of combinations expands:

Dropping her books on her desk, Nina gets comfortable.

Getting comfortable, Nina drops her books on her desk.

“Mr. Sanders, can we put that -ing verb at the end of the sentence, too?” Rita wonders. “Like, Nina drops her books on her desk, getting comfortable.” Her question allows Dan to show how participial phrases are movable. “Yes, this -ing thing, which, by the way, we call a participial phrase”—Dan wants students to use writers’ terminology—”can be written at the beginning or end of the sentence. It can even be written within the other sentence. Anyone want to try placing the participial phrase within the other sentence, the one about Nina dropping her books on her desk?”

“Well, what about Nina, getting comfortable, drops her books on her desk,” a voice calls from the back of the room.

“Or Nina, dropping her books on her desk, gets comfortable. Does that work?”

Dan writes those suggestions on the board, showing the participial phrase placed in numerous spots in the sentence.

At this point, Dan uses the “human sentences” activity so everyone in his class can see that participial phrases can indeed appear in various parts of the sentence (the students love seeing their friends up in front of the room). Dan has two choices: He can distribute sentence strips from the previous day’s charades for this activity or write new ones. He has groups of three separate the parts of a sentence—the participial phrase is one part, and the independent clause is cut into two parts, a subject section and a predicate section. Each group takes a turn standing in front of the class and moving the sentence sections from place to place, discovering how the participial phrase sounds in different locations. Here are three versions:

Unwrapping her candy, Monica shows off to everyone.

Monica, unwrapping her candy, shows off to everyone.

*Monica shows off to everyone, unwrapping her candy.

The class loves seeing friends up in front of the room. Students will notice that the first two versions make sense while the last example seems somehow off, giving Dan the opportunity to explain that the participial phrase needs to be placed near the person or thing that it describes.

Dan can easily discuss comma usage for participial phrases because it grows out of the rule that the students already learned for adjective clauses: Use commas to separate participial phrases when they are nonessential to the meaning of the independent clause; do not use commas if the participial phrase is essential for an understanding of the independent clause. He will contrast two sentences for the students:

My cousin Jeff, tossing his empty carton on the floor, littered the theater.

The person tossing his empty carton on the floor littered the theater.

The first sentence is clear without the participial phrase, so commas indicate that the words are nonessential. In the second sentence the participial phrase identifies which person is littering by naming his distinguishable behavior. The second sentence, therefore, contains an essential participial phrase and should not be separated by commas. Most of the participial phrases our students use will be nonessential and require commas. (See page 139 in Chapter 10for a lengthier explanation.)

Everyone in this class is using the metalanguage of a writer: The subject can go first, and the participial phrase can follow the subject, and the predicate can come last. Students also refer to essential or nonessential participial phrases and understand the conventions for punctuation.

In the next class, students will begin to use participial phrases in their own writing.

Day Three: Writing with Participial Phrases

The students will listen to Dan’s story about a basketball coach and then make a list of the coach’s physical responses to a crucial play. Their lists will provide specific details for descriptive paragraphs. Dan suspects their first drafts may not employ participial phrases, but his students will edit their sentences to include the participial phrases as part of the learning process.

He begins, “You probably have noticed this tall stick-figure I’ve drawn on the board. Let’s call him Coach Rice. Well, Coach Rice is very excited right now because his basketball players have made it to the semifinals. They’ve practiced four hours a day, perfecting a give-and-go play where Jimmy, their best player, fakes a shot, passes the ball to a teammate, and then gets the ball back, in position to score an easy basket.

“I’m going to tell you what happens next. You hold on to a pen or pencil, ready to jot down ideas when I ask you a question.

“Picture the coach: His players are winning the game. He’s happy. Then, in the last quarter, with only a minute to play, they fall behind by one point. He signals the special give-and-go play to retake the lead.

“Ron dribbles toward Jimmy and passes him the ball. Coach Rice can taste victory! Jimmy never misses. He catches the pass, leaps up in the air, shoots the ball, watches it stick on the rim, teeter on the edge, and fall—not into the basket, but into the waiting hands of the opposing team.

“How does the coach feel? After all that practice, in the moment of need, his players missed their play. Yes, the coach is upset—and how does his body show us that he’s upset? Think about this.

“In your imagination, look closely at the coach and jot down the signs of anger or frustration. What is he doing? List anything in the coach’s face, neck, shoulders, arms—what places on his body give you clues showing how he feels inside? I’ll give you a few minutes.”

The class works, thinking silently because they’ve been caught up in Dan’s hyperdramatic description. When he sees five or six details on their observation lists, Dan asks for suggestions and covers the board with ideas.

He drops his head forward ...

He tightens his shoulders . . .

He grips his hands into fists . . .

He hardens his jaw . . .

Dan urges more students to contribute, cueing them with more questions: What about his eyes? his back? his brow? Dan intentionally begins all his sentences with He to encourage his students to use active voice and a strong verb.

“Now, what I want you to do is to use any of the details we have written on the board to create a paragraph about this coach. Start with this sentence: The disappointed coach stood on the sidelines. You tell the story of how he looks, using any of the details on your lists or on the board in order to be descriptive.”

Will Dan’s students write their descriptions using the -ing verbs, the participial phrases they learned earlier? Dan hopes so! But here’s Maria’s paragraph:

The disappointed coach stood on the sidelines. He dropped his head forward and tightened his shoulders. He hardened his jaw and clenched his fists. He lifted one foot and stomped it on the gym floor. Then he took a big, deep breath. He sadly accepted defeat.

Dan compliments Maria’s careful observation and her inclusion of many visual details that help the reader picture Coach Rice. But he wants his students to do more than describe with simple sentences like the ones in her draft; he wants them to use the participial phrases they have been studying.

“Now, take a few minutes and revise your paragraph so at least two of those details are written as participial phrases. Change one part of the sentence to an -ing phrase like the sentences that we hung on the wall.” Again there is silence while students write. And here’s what Maria’s revision looks like:

The disappointed coach stood on the sidelines. Dropping his head forward, he tightened his shoulders. He hardened his jaw and clenched his fists. Lifting one foot, he stomped it on the gym floor. Then taking a big, deep breath, he accepted defeat.

“Good job! Isn’t that great, kids? Maria, your new paragraph flows so much more smoothly than the earlier version.” Dan’s praise reminds everyone of the progress they’re making as writers.

While some students are bound to overuse the participial phrases initially, we like to praise their efforts; they’ll soon learn to hear when different variations sound more pleasing for the reader.

“For your homework, I want you to picture another person. This time, it’s a mom sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with her six-year-old son.” Dan reads, from the following assignment sheet, the scenario describing a nervous mother. “Use this homework instruction sheet [see Figure 11.1] to list her actions, and then write a paragraph describing her nervous behavior. There is an extra credit-point for anyone who draws the worried mother and illustrates her body language. Tomorrow we will share your portraits.”

Day Four: Sharing Student Writing

To prepare for this class, Dan writes sample sentences from the frustrated-coach paragraphs on strips of paper and displays them as classroom models. As students enter, he divides them into groups of four and tells them to share their homework assignments about the nervous mother. Dan wants group members to select a favorite description from among their four versions and copy its sentences on strips of paper. They will use their sentence strips in front of the class as they read the paragraph.

He anticipates that some paragraphs will lack participial phrases, so he wants group members to help each other: “If you don’t see any participial phrases—ing phrases—in the homework paragraphs, you can suggest them to the writer. You’ll help each other edit.”

Figure 11.1 Homework Description Sheet

A mom sits in a doctor’s waiting room with her six-year-old son. The boy has a high fever and a limp body. He is breathing heavily and shivering. The mother knows that the doctor will come out and tell them what the tests have revealed, but she is very nervous.

What does her nervousness look like? Picture her hands, arms, legs, feet, cheeks, eyes, brows, shoulders, and write a list of six to eight clues that her body gives to reveal her nervousness. For example, “She is looking at the clock.” The more clues you write down, the better your description will be.

She is _______________.

She is _______________.

She is _______________.

She is _______________.

She is _______________.

She is _______________.

Write a paragraph about what she looks like, using the beginning sentence, The worried mother sat in the waiting room. You do not have to include every detail you’ve listed—you might think some sound better than others—but try to use three -ing phrases—participial phrases—in your description like we did today.

Underline the participial phrases in your sentences so we can easily see them. You may want to place the participial phrases in different spots in your sentences—at the beginning of a sentence, at the end, and in the middle. Experiment with their placement.

Here’s what one group reads as they hold up the sentences for all to see:

The nervous mother sat in the waiting room, tapping her fingers on the arm of the chair. Lifting her eyes to see the clock, she moved around on her chair. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, and then she straightened her skirt. Biting her lip, she tried to hold back tears.

Wow! That writing sounds pretty advanced! Dan applauds these students who have used participial phrases to express a number of body-language details. He encourages group members to use writers’ terminology as they display their sentences and explain how the participial phrases appear in different positions in each example. This community of writers impresses us with its genuine appreciation for sentence variety and use of detail for elaboration.

Dan has already announced a two-day homework assignment, asking students to begin writing a personal narrative. He wants them to use the theme of personal discovery, connecting their writing to their literature selection, Great Expectations, in which Pip makes important personal discoveries. He helps students brainstorm their individual topics and reminds them of useful writing strategies for personal narratives.

“After you write your drafts,” he tells students, “reread them and search for three sections in the story that are particularly important. In these important moments, you can slow the story down and hold the reader’s attention by using a telescopic lens on the scene, the way we did in class with our descriptions of Coach Rice and the nervous mother.

“In the places you select, add the body-language details that reveal your mood or feeling. For example, are you opening your eyes wide in surprise? Are you gripping the banister fearfully on your way down the stairs? Give the reader several additional body-language details by using participial phrases.” Dan’s homework assignment appears in Figure 11.2.

Day Five: Holding Personal Conferences with Students

Dan collects the revisions of the personal narrative papers to see how effectively the students have incorporated participial phrases and body-language detail. He feels disappointed with the amount of detail until he realizes that his students are still experimenting with and learning about the participial phrase. Next he reads the stories overnight and writes brief notes to students, asking for more detail in key moments.

He uses half of the next class period to talk personally to each student about his marginal comments. His one-to two-minute conferences give him the chance to say, “I’d really like to see how your hand holds the racket—with tight fingers? How are your knees or feet at that moment?” or “Could you tell me what you felt when your friend told you she was too busy to visit? Was there a reaction in your shoulders or back or eyes?”

Dan discovers that his brief conferences make revision easier for the students. Despite all the class work on envisioning action, writing participial phrases, and mentioning body language, his students need more guidance before they can independently spot the need for, and include details expressed through, participial phrases.

Figure 11.2 Revising Your Personal Narrative

Now you are in the revising stage of your “Important Moment” paper. You hope your reader will feel the impact of this moment the way you did. Here’s how you can help your reader: Focus on some scenes leading up to the important moment—as if you are a cameraperson zooming in for a close-up shot. If you give the reader details of how your body language is affected in these moments, you will keep your readers’ attention and help them feel like they are part of the story.

When you help your reader visualize with vivid details like these, you will produce a more successful paper. You will also create more sentence variation if you write some of these details with participial phrases the way we have practiced in class.

Here are some examples of sentences that use the details above in sentences with participial phrases.

Your job is to locate three important moments in the first draft of the story and add body-language details to make the scene more vivid. Use participial phrases like the examples above to achieve sentence variation. Underline at least four sentences where you have used participial phrases to increase the detail or provide sentence variation.

When writing progress develops slowly, we need to use patience and praise to build student self-confidence. One student wrote in a final assessment, “My short writing conference really helped me see places where little details of body language would make my paper much better.”

Day Six: Simplifying Punctuation with Basic Rules

Dan approaches the dreaded punctuation section of his unit not with a stack of worksheets, but with a classful of student narratives—all waiting for a final edit. He is ready to integrate ideas learned in earlier units: the introductory adverb clause (aka AC1), where students use a comma to set off adverb clauses that appear before an independent clause (see pages 112-113), and the nonessential element, which students learn in the unit on adjective clauses (pages 137-138).

To provide models, he writes three sentences on the board:

A kid running down the hall jolted my shoulder as he passed.

Turning to find him, I pivoted around and dropped all my books.

My friend, watching from nearby, came to help me pick up my things.

“Take a minute to look at the punctuation of these sentences, two with commas and one without any commas. Let’s hear some ideas about why the last two need the commas but the first doesn’t.”

Michael’s hand goes up. “I think the third sentence with watching from nearby is like the extra information that we talked about last month. You don’t really need to know where the friend was in order to understand that he helped the person pick up the stuff.”

“My man, you are so right!” Dan responds. “That was our nonessential rule from the adjective-clause unit. Whenever the added clause or phrase is nonessential, we separate it from the independent clause with commas.”

Dan writes that rule on the board and points at the visual—still hanging on the wall—from the class’s adjective-clause unit. He uses colored chalk to underline watching from nearby and gives students time to reflect on My friend came to help me pick up my things—a perfectly clear idea without the added participial phrase. “Most of the time these participial phrases are nonessential and we do need commas.”

Then Dan returns to the first sentence and underlines the participial phrase running down the hall. “Anyone want to say why this sentence doesn’t need commas?”

“I remember something about words being essential to a sentence,” Mary says haltingly. “So here you don’t want to say that any kid ran into you: It’s like the kid running down the hall that did it. It’s not like Tommy, running down the hall.. .’cause then you would know who the person was. But here the kid is kinda vague, like ‘which kid?’“

Bingo! The students are beginning to synthesize the rules behind the punctuation conventions. Dan leads them to discover that the rule for nonessentials applies to participial phrases as well as to adjective clauses. With a few more example sentences, he mentions how all-inclusive the rule is, since it applies to appositives and parenthetical expressions as well:

Mr. Yusim, my math teacher, came into the hall to see what the fuss was about.

My friend, of course, told him the whole story.

I got a pass, therefore, and wasn’t late to class.

“Earlier this year,” Dan says, “we learned how to use all these words, and now we see that they share the same comma rule for nonessentials: We use commas to separate nonessentials from the independent clause. The appositive (my math teacher) and parenthetical expressions (of course, therefore) both require commas because they are nonessential.

“But what about the second sentence, folks? Did we study any rule that would explain why we need a comma after turning to find him?”

The silence that follows doesn’t surprise Dan because many months have passed since the class talked about introductory adverb clauses. He wants the kids to dig deep in their grammar arsenal, so he writes another pair of sentences:

After I finished my math class, I had to go to band practice.

I had to go to band practice after I finished my math class.

“I guess the big question here is why one of these sentences needs a comma and the other doesn’t—after all, they explain the same thing and use the same words. Any volunteers?”

That visual clue is enough to remind everyone of the punctuation rule for AC1 (adverb clause before the independent clause) and AC2 (adverb clause after the independent clause). In this class the students have referred to that same comma rule in every paper they’ve edited. Collectively they have an aha! moment. Dan is able to spotlight the general rule:

We separate words that appear in the introductory position by using a comma:

As soon as I picked up my books, I went to class. (adverb clause)

Sitting down at my desk, I began writing. (participial phrase)

A normally organized person, I felt a little shaky after the collision. (appositive)

Therefore, it took me a little while to calm down and concentrate. (conjunctive adverb)

By now, Dan has reached the top of the grammar mountain! His students are seeing a simplified but comprehensive set of patterns that underlie most punctuation. He reminds the students that most of what they need to remember falls into one of three categories: nonessential items, introductory items, or the separation of compound sentences. The students will punctuate and edit from this point on according to three basic principles of sentence punctuation, illustrated in Figure 11.3. Armed with the information in this chart, Dan’s students can discuss sentence style with each other: They have the knowledge necessary to vary sentences and improve their prose.

Figure 11.3 Punctuation Overview Chart

Figure 11.4 Chapter 11 Overview Chart