Teaching Students to Add Details to Their Writing
Are your students struggling to add details to writing? Often times we ask our students to write a short story and we get just that, a short story…a really short story that ends up lacking details, dialogue, and vivid descriptions. Keep reading on for some ideas to help your students add details to their writing.
Start Small
Before we expect our students to write lengthy pieces of writing filled with beautiful descriptive language, we have to give them bite-sized pieces to digest first. So, when planning a lesson on descriptive writing, I first focus on improving individual sentences.
To model this, I write a “boring” sentence like this one on the board:
“The dog chased the ball.”
Now, before we start adding or changing words, I provide CONTEXT for my students. So, I show them this picture and explain the story behind it.
This is my dog, Kai. (Isn’t he cute?) He’s an energetic, one-year-old German Shepherd. He LOVES to play fetch and tug-of-war with his humans. He HATES taking baths. For a big dog, he acts like the biggest baby and complains the whole time he is getting bathed. On this particular summer day, he just finished his bath and is overly excited and just wants to play. So, play we did!
Not only have students gained context, but this example is also engaging the students in the classroom. Students LOVE learning more about their teachers. So anytime you can bring a little about yourself into the content, you will have more students on board with learning. Also, bringing pets into the conversation always helps as well, turning it into a fun writing activity!
At this point we go back to, “The dog chased the ball.” I ask students, if Kai is the dog in this sentence, does this sentence really help us visualize or understand what is happening? We discuss how this sentence could apply to any dog and we don’t know how they are chasing the ball. Is it the golden retriever dock diving after his ball, the puppy bouncing along after it, or the old English bulldog taking his time getting to his ball? We end up having some great discussions in the classroom on how we can add details to writing about this topic. I utilize a variety of academic discourse strategies for students to determine how the use of stronger word choice, specific details, sensory language, as well as context will improve the sentence.
After we have our discussion, I turn students loose to rewrite the sentence into a more descriptive sentence about how this particular dog chased his ball. After we share out, we find that we have some strong descriptive writing and we are ready to apply the skill on a bigger scale.
Show, Not Tell
Many students can write a sentence and add some adjectives and descriptive language to make a sentence stronger. However, many struggle to add details to writing in a longer passage. This is where teaching students to SHOW their story, and not just telling it comes in. To make this happen, I provide students with a telling statement. A telling statement is similar to our boring sentence from earlier. All it does is tell us what is happening, but we have no details or context to go with it. Then I provide students with a paragraph that SHOWS how that telling statement actually happened. With the example with my dog, Kai, I could provide a paragraph explaining the context of him just getting a bath and then go into lots of detail about how this wet, overgrown pup tore after his orange and blue Chuckit ball like nobody’s business. I make sure to add sensory language, my dialogue speaking to him, strong adjectives and adverbs, and specific details. After providing this example to students and discussing the elements that make it descriptive, I ask students to write their own paragraph from a telling statement.
Narrative Writing Prompt
At this point we wrote descriptive sentences and paragraphs. After practicing these skills, students are probably ready for a larger scale narrative writing prompt, focusing on descriptive writing. I typically have students writing a personal narrative in the form of a moment in time writing piece. I don’t want students writing about a big family trip or their entire life. If they want to write about their trip, that’s wonderful, but I have them pick one event from it so they can really focus on adding details to just that one. Otherwise, the story loses focus, and we’re back to flat stories. Remember they need bite-sized pieces here if we really want them to be descriptive. I provide students with their prompt and several graphic organizers to help them plan, write, and revise their work. All the while, I am checking in with students often on their progress and reading small sections of their writing and provide feedback. Students are also provided opportunities for academic discourse to collaborate, and peer review their work. As a result, we get stronger, more descriptive student writers in the classroom.
If you are interested in a resource to help you further with this process, please take a look HERE.
