At a recent teacher inservice, teachers asked, “How do we get students to add details?”
The short answer is you need more prewriting. For either fictional or nonfiction essays, students need a rich prewriting experience to find the details needed for a great essay.
There’s one thing guaranteed to strengthen the details in your students’ narratives: sensory details. As human beings, we experience the world through our senses. Adding specifics about what you see, hear, touch/feel (temperature/texture, not emotions), smell and taste easily creates stronger essays.
The temptation is to think adjectives. Sure, sensory details will be about adjectives: red, loud, frigid, acrid, and sweet. But students also need to think verbs: dashed, squeaked, melted, stunk, and puckered.
An easy exercise is to ask students to write the senses along one side of a page. Then ask them to think about the narrative they are writing and write at least three sensory details for each of the senses. (My book, Paper Lighting, has a Sensory Details Worksheet to photocopy.)
Here are some guidelines:
- Jot down ideas, not complete sentences. Words or phrases are fine.
- Be as specific as possible.
NOT: dog
INSTEAD: German shepherd that limps - Try. Yes, depending on your situation, some of the senses are harder than others. Visual and auditory details are usually the easiest, with smell and taste the hardest. Push students to try to get at least something on every sense and for the strongest senses they can do more than three.
Once the students have done a sensory detail worksheet, they can start working on the first draft of a narrative. They do NOT have to use every sensory detail; they may think of other details as they write and can include them. This also works as a revision exercise.
Details for NonFiction
Details for nonfiction might also include sensory details. But you can also teach students to look for specifics in three areas:
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li>Statistics. Numbers matter in nonfiction and while students research, they should be searching for relevant statistics.
- Proper nouns and jargon. Likewise, it’s important to use specific names for people, places or things. Often, a topic has jargon or technical vocabulary that lends specificity to an essay. The time to find these vocabulary words is during the prewriting and research phases.
- Facts. This is a catch-all category that includes any other specific information about the subject. Encourage students to find as many facts as possible during the prewriting and research phases.
Once students have enough facts, they’ll need to learn to use the facts. Refer to Paper Lightning for a great sorting exercise.
For more, on adding details through prewriting to fiction or nonfiction, see Paper Lightning.