Power of Writing Single Paragraph Outlines
Children often tend to put together sentences without much thought. The result is a lack of connection between sentences that often leaves the reader feeling confused.
Writing in response to an interesting writing prompt is exciting and tough at the same time. It is tough because the mind rattles off several ideas and thoughts one after another. Keeping pace with it is hard and the result is a collection of sentences with thoughts/ideas that seem so disconnected!
Either that is the problem or the child does not have any clue what to write. Hence the child writes whatever comes to his or her mind and often struggles to write more than 2-3 sentences.
Single paragraph outlines and writing coherently
We considered a single paragraph outline based on this picture. The children wrote one or two sentences each to describe the first thoughts that came to their minds. Following which, there was demonstration of how these thoughts could be written as an outline first and then as a complete paragraph.
Single paragraph outline (credit: Judith C.Hochman and Natalie Wexler)
A topic sentence (Introductory sentence to catch the attention of the reader)
………………………………………………………….
………………………………………………………….
………………………………………………………….
(dotted lines for noting down the thoughts that form the core of the paragraph)
Concluding sentence- the main message that the writer wants to convey to the reader.
The complete paragraph is written based on the outline. This two step approach enables the writer to
Focus completely on writing without having to manage the flow of thoughts/ideas simultaneously.
It also enables them to ensure that there is a sense of connectivity between the sentences and the paragraph does not entirely read as random set of sentences put together.
Helps the writer think in lines of what he or she ultimately wants to convey to the reader.
Writing allocations given were also single paragraph outline assignments to enable the writers to practice this approach.