Teacher's Guide:

Antonyms and Comma Splices

Mimicking Charles Dickens, then fixing those punctuation errors

This lesson was created by NNWP Teacher Consultant Corbett Harrison. You can access all of Corbett's on-line lessons by clicking here.

The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author, especially from chapter 1 of the book.

To our loyal WritingFix users: Please use this link if purchasing A Tale of Two Cities from Amazon.com, and help keep WritingFix free and on-line. We thank you!

Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources:

Step one (sharing the published model):  Place this overhead-ready copy of Dickens' opening to A Tale of Two Cities where students can see it. Review the word antonym, and have student groups brainstorm alternative antonyms to as many of the items in the series as they can. For example, "It was the best of times, it was the most awful of times..."

Explain that Charles Dickens created this very long, comma-splice filled passage for effect. He was a professional; he was allowed to break sentence punctuation rules. Student writers aren't so lucky; they have to follow the rules. Explain, "Today, we're going to each write a parody of Mr. Dickens' passage, using a more modern day topic, and then we're going to use coordinating conjunction, adverbial conjunctions, and subordinating conjunctions to have our passages completely free of comma splices."

Tell students their parodies of Dickens need to include, at least, 6 pairs of interesting, well-chosen antonyms, and that their parodies will need to conclude with an "In short" sentence, like Dickens does.

Step two (introducing the teacher model):  To show what a parody looks like, create one of your own before teaching this lesson, or use the one I provide here. You really should make your own though about a topic that intrigues you!

Only show the top half of this overhead; the second half will be revealed later.

• Teacher model of this parody assignment for the overhead
• Three student models for this writing assignment

Step three (thinking and pre-writing): Get students thinking about a person, place, or thing that might be the best and the worst simultaneously. The interactive button game on the Student Instruction Page has 20 great sentence starters for this assignment, if your students can't think of one on their own.

Have students create their rough drafts while they refer to Dickens' model (or the teacher model) on the overhead. If some students finish early, encourage them to go back and choose even stronger words for their antonyms.

When all writers have a draft with at least 6 antonym pairs and an "in short" sentence that serves as a conclusion, teach a mini-lesson on punctuating for coordinating, then adverbial, then, subordinating conjunctions. These can all be done in one day, or you can spread them out over three days. The overheads to help you teach this mini-lesson can be found below.

• Conjunction Overheads for Mini-Lessons

Have students apply each conjunction rule to sentences in their own writing. When all three mini-lessons have been taught, show the bottom half of the the teacher model overhead, and have students revise their original passages. In the revision, students:

• can have no comma splices
• must use (and punctuate for) six different conjunctions--two coordinating, two adverbial, two subordinating

Step four (revising with specific trait language):   The teacher model (from the overhead) has some obvious word revisions between its original and the second draft (at the bottom of the same overhead). Encourage revision between students' original, comma-spliced passages and their second drafts. Consider attaching a Word Choice Post-It to their rough drafts to encourage word revisions. For more ideas on WritingFix's Revision & Response Post-Its, click here.

• Sheet of 6 Word Choice Post-It Notes

Step four (editing for conventions):  After students apply their revision ideas to their drafts and re-write neatly, require them to have a fellow editor check their punctuation.   If you've established a "Community of Editors" among your students, have each student exchange his/her paper with multiple peers.  With yellow high-lighters in hand, each peer reads for and highlights suspected errors for just one item from the Editing Post-it.  The "Community of Editors" idea is just one of dozens and dozens of inspiring ideas that is talked about in detail in the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Going Deep with 6 Trait Language Workbook for Teachers.

Step six (publishing for the portfolio):   The goal of most lessons posted at WritingFix is that students end up with a piece of writing they like, and that their writing was taken through all steps of the writing process. After revising, invite your students to come back to this piece once more during an upcoming writer's workshop block.  The writing started with this lesson might become even more polished for final placement in the portfolio, or the big ideas being written about here might transform into a completely different piece of writing. Most likely, your students will enjoy creating an illustration for this writing as they ready to place final drafts in their portfolios.

Interested in publishing student work on-line? You might earn a free classroom resource from the NNWP! We invite teachers to teach this lesson completely, then share up to three of their students' best notebook pages and their revised and edited stories at our ning's Publish Student Writers group. Fifty teachers a year who do this will receive a complimentary copy of one of the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Print Guides.

To submit student samples for this page's lesson, click here. You won't be able to post unless you are a verified member of this site's Writing Lesson of the Month ning.