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Word Choice Lessons for Better Essays

April 20, 2012 By Jimmie Quick 2 Comments

word choice lessons for better essays: Teaching Homeschool Writing

The words your child uses to write can make him seem a grade above (or below) where he actually is. Sophisticated words say “mature writer.” Building vocabulary is a primary way to improve the words used in essay writing, but there are other activities you can do to encourage writers to choose the best words.

Brainstorm Word Replacements

There are some words that are dull enough to be on the list of unwanted words:

  • good
  • bad
  • thing
  • very
  • really
Those words are imprecise, lackluster, and immature. I typically ban those words from essays, forcing my daughter to select a better fitting term that is more descriptive and sophisticated.
Likely your child has a few pet words that she likes to use repeatedly. My daughter is in a phase right now where she uses the word awkward for a myriad of negative situations. Although awkward is otherwise a quality word, her misuse of it makes me add it to her banned word list.
Help your child with word choice by doing some brainstorming activities on my free word choice printables. (This printable is part of my ebook Essay Tune Up.) Of course, the thesaurus is your friend for these kinds of activities. List possible alternatives to boring words and keep those lists handy during revision.
If you have room, you might even want to make some fun word posters like Amy did.

Banish Boring Words!: , a Scholastic book for grades 4-8, looks like a wonderful resource for building a child’s word sense.

No Boring Words Day

Practice replacing boring words like good and bad with more interesting, more precise words in your daily conversations. Choose an outlawed word for the day. When someone says the banished word, he receives a “punishment.” Or keep points throughout the day to see who is the best at avoiding the forbidden words and replacing them with more colorful ones.

This kind of activity works best after you have done the word replacement activities above. By using the listed synonyms in your daily speech, the words will become a natural part of your vocabulary and will spill into essay writing.

Editing for Word Choice

You really can’t expect superior word choice on a first draft. It takes a devoted reading of the essay to analyze the vocabulary without thinking of anything else. That means that working on word choice is something that happens during the revision stage of writing.

I suggest you give your child a highligher and ask her first to look for any of your word outlaws — those on the list above and any others you have added. Then have her look through the essay for additional words that could be replaced with more mature and precise choices.

One danger with this kind of activity is that your child will go overboard with the thesaurus and turn her essay into something very pedantic sounding. The words need to be natural and flow nicely with the tone of the essay. Do choose  words that create mental pictures, that are descriptive and powerful. But don’t make an essay that sounds stilted or awkward. (I just used the word awkward! It is on my daughter’s outlawed word list but not on mine.)

One key rule of thumb is if your child cannot pronounce or express the meaning of a word, he probably should not use it in an essay.

 

The 10 Days Series is organized by iHomeschool Network, a collaboration of outstanding homeschool bloggers who connect with each other and with family-friendly companies in mutually beneficial projects.

Visit the other posts to be blessed with tips on how to handle bad days, cultivating curiosity, teaching with Legos, and much much more!

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Filed Under: language arts Tagged With: homeschool, teaching, writing

Comments

  1. Kerry @HowToHomeschoolMyChild says

    April 21, 2012 at 8:32 am

    Jimmie,
    This is such a good idea. I did it with my kids and they kept a chart of “banned words” and replacement words. When I saw they were overusing a word, we came up with a list of replacement words.

    Reply
  2. kayla says

    October 22, 2012 at 8:17 pm

    hi i am a fith grader. I really understand what your saying and i think its remarkable about what you are saying about banishing boring words and i respect that. You are so cool with what you do with are writing or laungage lifes in schoo and you should make a rpintable banish boring book that you made by yourself. Well i am just trying to say that you have taught me well and that i love what you are doing.So please make a printable banish boring book that i can use for school and that would make me smart. So keep u the good work and make sure you keep going with his remarkable, awesome, delightful, and most important learningful, experienced website.

    Reply

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So glad you clicked over. You are welcome here. I'm Jimmie, a single, work from home mom of one teen.

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