The Sentence Smart's Writer's Guide

​​When you are analyzing any text, there are at least three central or important questions that must be answered: 

• Who or what is the writer mostly talking about? In other words who or what is the writer’s subject? To put it even more simply: which person, place, thing, or idea is the writer talking about?
• What is the writer saying about that subject? In other words, what is the writer saying about that person, place, thing, or idea?
• How does the writer choose and arrange words and groups of words to communicate important ideas clearly? In other words, how does the writer answer the question that every writer (including you) must answer: “What goes where and why?”

Skimming and Scanning the passage: Step One
To begin answering these questions, you must look carefully and quickly at the title of the passage and any introductory material that is given about the passage. Then, you must look over the entire passage quickly to get a basic idea of who or what the writer is talking about. This process is called skimming or scanning the passage.  

Question Creation: Step Two
Once you have a basic sense of who or what the passage is mostly about, place that subject in the center of a circle  and begin to create questions about that key person, place, thing, or idea.

Use being, action, and helping verbs to create important questions about this subject. These are questions that the writer may have answered in the passage, or they’re questions that you think are important to ask and answer about the subject.

For example: Put the subject in the blank below and create the following question:

Who or what is (or are) ___________?
When?
Where?
Why?
How?

 Read the passage carefully: Step Three
Now that you have asked those critical questions, read the passage with those questions in mind. Look for the answers to some or all of those questions as you read the passage carefully.

After you have finished reading the passage, see if you can answer any or all of the original questions that you created in the  pre-reading stage.  Please note that those questions were designed to organize your thinking about the passage, and to help you read with greater concentration and understanding. But the writer may or may not have answered all of those questions. In some cases, it may be helpful to do some research about the topic to try to answer some of your key questions.  This research may provide important background knowledge and context for reading the passage with greater understanding.

Analyze your answers: Step Four
Review your answer to the first important question: Who or what is (or are)  ______________?
                                                                                                                              
Next, analyze your answer by asking and answering the first three Sentence Analysis Questions on your Sentence Smart Chart.  You can use your pre-filled Sentence Analysis Sheet to do.

Next, analyze your answers to any of the original questions that you asked and were able to answer based on the passage or background information.  This grammatical analysis allows you to separate your answers into subject and predicate sections. Each subject and predicate section can then be “interviewed” and expanded into more sentences and more complex sentences. This is what you will be doing in step five.

Expand and combine your sentences: Step Five
Now that you have analyzed your answers to the first questions, it’s time to expand those answers by seeing if there are any adverb or adjective questions that you can ask and answer based on the information that you’ve read in the passage. Be careful: These adverb and adjective questions must produce factual answers. These answers must be in the passage or in the background information that you have researched about the subject. You should not create any answers that are not supported by the passage or by background information.  Your goal is to look for related ideas in the passage that can be embedded or added to your original basic sentences about the subject of the passage.  These ideas can be added to your original sentences by creating adverbial answers that begin with subordinating conjunctions and adjectival answers that begin with relative pronouns.   For example, students can add more information to the subject of a sentence by placing relative pronouns such as “who,” “which,” and “that” immediately after subject nouns or pronouns or after nouns and pronouns in the predicate. “That” and “who” are normally placed after person-nouns, and “which” is placed after things and ideas. When these relative pronouns are placed after subject or predicate nouns, they create adjectival clauses which allow the writer to cultivate and combine ideas within sentences.  By adding adjectival and adverbial words, phrases, and clauses, writers can develop more ideas about the subject and the predicate of each sentence and expand these ideas to create more sentences or richer complex and compound sentences.  The writer’s goal is to keep developing thoughts and connecting those thoughts to each other so that the reader gains a clear, coherent, and complex understanding of the main idea—and all the supporting ideas—that the writer is seeking to communicate.

To summarize, use transitional words, subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, appositives,  and relative pronouns to create compound and complex sentences which reveal the  logical connections within and between your sentences.  These adverbs, adjectives, and conjunctions will help you to continue developing the idea in your first basic sentences until you have a series of connected ideas that can now become a complete, coherent paragraph. Use the following sentence starters and sentence connectors to develop the idea that you expressed in your first sentence which by now may have become a topic sentence for a paragraph.  A comprehensive guide to conjunctions and other transitional terms is included in the reference section attached to this document.

• For example,
• Since
• If
• Because
• When
• Therefore
• However

Review, edit, and revise your paragraph: Step Six
Review, edit, and revise your paragraph by applying your knowledge of grammatical structures to your writing. The following six self-editing steps are the keys to ensuring that you have created coherent, well written paragraphs and essays:

Step One: Check for complete sentences by asking yourself the following questions:

Have I expressed my ideas in complete sentences? Does each statement have a subject-verb relationship that makes complete sense?  In other words, is each statement a complete thought? Does each statement have a subject and a predicate that makes sense? Is each subject connected to a verb?  If you find incomplete thoughts or fragments, then turn them into sentences by creating a statement with a subject-verb relationship that makes complete sense.

Step Two:  Make sure that your sentences are either combined or separated properly.

Check for any group of words that have subject-verb relationships. These groups of words, as you already know, are called clauses.  Make sure that independent clauses (complete thoughts) are properly separated with periods or combined with commas and coordinating conjunctions, or colons, or semicolons. You may also choose to create complex sentences by using subordinating conjunctions to combine two independent clauses into a dependent-independent clause relationship.

Step Three: Make sure that the subject verb relationship within each sentence is clear and easy for the reader to identify.

Ask yourself: Is it easy for me or anyone else to clearly identify the subject-verb relationship in each of my clauses and complete sentences? Will the reader find it easy to ask and answer the following questions about each sentence or clause: Who or what is the subject of this group of words? And what is the writer saying about the subject?  If you can answer these questions quickly, then perhaps it will also be easy for the reader to do so.  You may want someone else to try to ask and answer those questions about each of your clauses or sentences to see how easy—or difficult—you have made it for the reader to follow your thoughts.

Step Four: Make sure that you have created logical relationships (or connections) within and between your sentences.

It’s important for the reader to know how the ideas within and between your sentences are related to each other.  For example, the terms you choose such as therefore, but, when, or however, can help the reader to understand whether you are illustrating a cause and effect or contrast relationship within and between your sentences.  Check your complex or compound sentences to make sure that you have used the correct conjunction to connect your clauses.  Then check to see whether you can add a transitional word such as therefore, or however between sentences to show how the ideas in each sentence are connected to others.

Step Five: Check your punctuation and spelling.

Make sure that you used periods, commas, semicolons, colons, and question marks properly. Then double check your spelling. Finally make sure that your verb endings are correct.

Step Six: Review your entire paragraph.

Make sure that your paragraph has a topic sentence which expresses the main idea of that paragraph. Then check to see if you have supported or developed that main idea with complete sentences.