Writing About Your Life: Revise

Lesson Goal

Students will learn to revise an autobiographical incident against six criteria, and to combine short choppy sentences by turning one into a subordinate clause that begins with a time or place word, with a comma when the clause comes first.

Key Concepts

A clause has a subject and a verb. An independent clause can stand alone as a sentence, and a subordinate clause can't, because it begins with a word that makes it lean on another clause.

A subordinate clause on its own is a fragment. It has to be attached to an independent clause.

Where Students Get Stuck

Forgetting the comma when the clause comes first, as in 'When I got home I cried'.

Leaving a subordinate clause alone, which makes a fragment. 'When I got home.' is not a sentence.

Teaching Suggestion

Have the student read his draft aloud and mark any place where he runs out of breath or stumbles. Those spots are where short sentences are most worth combining.

The lesson quotes one pair of sentences from Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845), which the student met in the previous lesson, to show the clause-first comma.

Key Vocabulary

Revise

To improve a draft after it's written, by changing what doesn't work.

Peer review

When a partner reads your draft and tells you what works and what doesn't.

Independent clause

A group of words with a subject and a verb that can stand alone as a sentence.

Subordinate clause

A group of words with a subject and a verb that can't stand alone, because it begins with a word like when or after.