New Project: Innovative Sentences to Learn From
a new resource for student writing—with a hope to keep building upon it
Take a side-profile look at any of my favorite books; you’ll find a litany of small gaps from dog-eared corners across their pages; open to any of those dog-eared pages; you’ll find a hastily-scrawled underlining of a sentence; the pen’s color having to do entirely with its proximity to me at the time of the dog-earring.
The result? I have a lot of really cool sentences from a lot of books that mean a great deal to me.
All of which led to one of my summer projects that I wanted to share today: a collection of forty innovative sentence structures and techniques that can serve as writing models for students.
From Maya Angelou to Cormac McCarthy to Yaa Gyasi to Chaim Potok to Toni Morrison—and with a whole section dedicated to the words of the late Brian Doyle—you’ll find sentences that run afoul from what we traditionally expect of sentences.
And they run afoul with conviction. And eloquence. And impact.
You can access the full project here. (And the accompanying spreadsheet here.)
Here’s what you’ll find in it:
More Than Just Model Sentences
For each model sentence, I created a slide that contains not just the sentence with the highlighted writing technique, but also three other factors that are intended to make this helpful for others to use:
Technique Explanation—A very-brief description of what is being done in the example sentence to go beyond the “technique name” at the top of the slide. (Of course, this is just my own explanation, and I’m sure there are other ways to do this!) In these explanations, the emphasis is on the structure and how that structure itself adds to the meaning the sentence is trying to convey.
Teacher’s Note—An attempt by me to add a thought or suggestion about how this might work in the classroom for a teacher building from my own experience. The goal here is to make this a teacher-centered resource, so I tried to add these notes around either the skill that can be taught with the particular sentence model or a potential follow-up activity that could be productive with it.
Potential Application Prompt[s]—The best way for students (and everyone else) to learn is through application, so I included at least one way students could try out this sentence technique quickly and purposefully. Quite honestly, too, I tried to write these in a way that I myself could plug-and-play in my own classroom several months from now, hypothetically: quick activities for students to dive into in order to practice the sentence.
Overall, my hope is that the slide deck creates a ready-to-use set of tools that any ELA teacher can incorporate with a dedicated whole-class lesson while also offering a great resource to provide for students who are looking to push beyond the typical writing confines of an English class. (Particularly in a ChatGPT-infused world in which those typical writing confines become less valuable by the second.)
Why This Project?
Though I walked out of this past school year feeling great about what students achieved and the community they built, one reflection I sat with was an acknowledgment that I need to do better as an English teacher at giving students tangible models for writing at the sentence level. And I know that one way I will respond to this in the upcoming year will be by leaning on more scaffolds and tools for students around this skill along stronger formative feedback.
Nevertheless, I also want to keep a firm grasp on the value of innovation with writing going forward—and I believe this project can offer a foundation of tools to help push students towards more versatility and creativity in not just what they write but how. While I’ve long been a fan of celebrating instances of beautiful student writing, my goal is to go into this school year with a more intentional, systemic approach towards it.
And on a personal level, I wanted to lean on authors and books that have moved me as a reader. It would have been easy to start Googling different quotes from books I may have never even opened—but the best type of writing never arrives via easy.
Instead, I was able to sit with the joy that was opening books I have opened many times before; that was rereading sentences that had been underlined in enthusiastic-and-haphazard appreciation, sometimes years ago; that was thinking about what about these sentences made them so meaningful and worth sharing.
Not the worst way to spend one’s time, right?
So What’s Next With This Project?
Well, first of all, like so many other resources on The Broken Copier, feel free to use it if you find it helpful in your own classroom! You are welcome to use it as it is, or to copy/adapt with your own additions and changes—make it work for your students!
I will likely add to this original project over time (I started with a goal of 50 and I am quite stubborn), and I may also create a parallel project based 100% off of student writing samples—potentially with their own reflections included!
However, I also want to create a collective space for other educators to share their own favorite sentences with each other—which is why I made this Google Form and also have open access to the shared results from that form. This way not only can you share your own favorite sentence and your reasoning on what makes it so innovative and impactful, but you also can explore the sentences shared by all others.
(If it takes off, I’ll try to spend some time revising it to be shared in the same way as my original project!)
As mentioned earlier, a conviction I continue to hold is that the ability to write with versatility and innovation is a key ingredient in the ability to write authentically—and the ability to write authentically is a key ingredient in the ability to tell one’s story in the fullest, most meaningful of ways.
I hope this is another step forward in helping students towards this goal, and I hope too that it is helpful for others in that work, too.
—Marcus
Great stuff. Thank you for sharing - came across this on Twitter and I am always looking for ways to improve.
First -- I really miss our interactions on Tw*tter, especially today when I would love to pick your brain about student writing. (mrskellylove)