Lesson 3 - Written Communication

Essay Writing Techniques: Organizing Your Thoughts

- Begin with an introduction that clearly describes the purpose of your essay. - Devote each paragraph to a single idea/topic with supporting evidence and examples. - End essay with a strong conclusion that ties all the components of your essay together.

Essay Writing Techniques: Create an Outline

- Come up with a plan. - Each paragraph should express a single idea. - Build your outline around your strongest overall points. - Each bullet is the focus for each paragraph (you will turn these in to detailed sentences with supporting evidence later)

Common Grammatical Errors: Subject-Verb Agreement

- If your subject is singular your verb must also be singular. -If your subject is plural your verb needs to match

Common Grammatical Errors: Semicolon Usage

- Semicolons (;) are used to join two complete sentences together. - a longer a pause in a sentence indicates where a semicolon should be placed.

Essay Writing Techniques: Match the Tone of Your Topic

- While you want to include your voice in your writing, you also want to make sure your tone reflects the type of writing your doing - tone. - tone (not to be confused with voice) is not an action, it's an attitude. - ask yourself: 1. Why am I writing this? 2. Who is my intended audience? 3. What do I want the reader to read, understand, or think about?

Common Grammatical Errors: Compound Sentences

- a compound sentence is one with more than one subject, usually connected by a conjunction such as "and", "or", or "but". - in these types of sentences, a comma should come before the conjunction at the end of the first clause. - a comma only PRECEDES a conjunction when it is joining two independent clauses which are complete sentences.

Common Grammatical Errors: Proper Punctuation

- an exclamation (!) tells the reader that you mean your point to be taken with emphasis. - a period (.) indicates the end of a thought. - a comma (,) indicates cause. - a parenthesis (()) typically means your providing additional information about something in the sentence.

Essay Writing Techniques: Adding Your Voice

- read a variety of novels to identify what you like about the author's writing. - identify qualities about your personality to bring out in your writing (e.g, playful, serious, funny, etc.) - free-write topics of your choice to craft your style. - say a sentence aloud then write it down verbatim. - write what feels natural - don't force it.

Common Grammatical Errors: Prepositional Phrases

- when a prepositional phrase is at the end of a sentence it is NOT separated by a comma like it would be at the beginning of a sentence.

Common Grammatical Errors: Verb Tense

- whether you're talking about past, present, or future be sure that you use the corresponding verb tense (e.g, I was, I am, I will) -don't change verb tense unnecessarily-be consistent

Essay Writing Techniques: Support Your Ideas

Once you have your topics for each paragraph: -come up with 3 to 4 key points that support and prove the statements you make in each paragraph This process is key to organizing your thoughts logically and staying on track through each paragraph