Journalism and English Teacher Tracey Burger at John A. Ferguson Senior High School in Miami. Full-bio

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Lesson Plans Revision strategy: Using math to improve writing

Tracey Burger
John A. Ferguson Senior High School
Miami, Fla.

Title: Revision strategy: Using math to improve writing

Overview and rationale:

Students will learn a mathematically-based revision strategy in order to improve clarity, precision, and reduce or eliminate passive voice.

Goals for understanding:

• Students will learn to be more critical of their word choice and sentence structure and will be able to identify and eliminate worthless words.

Directions:

• Begin by listing the following sentence on the board: “The ball was hit by the bat.”
• Explain that the students will assign either a one-point or zero-point value to words.
• Examples of zero point words:
  • Articles
  • Most prepositions
  • Intensifiers
  • Forms of the verb “to be”
  • Worthless words, such as “nice, pretty, fun, etc.”
    
• 0      1     0     1   0   0   1
  The ball was hit by the bat.
• Create a proportion indicating the number of points divided by the number of words.  For the example above, the proportion is 3/7. This means that more than half the words in the sentence are not meaningful.
• If we revise the sentence to read, “The bat hit the ball,” the proportion rises to 3/5.  The goal is to get the fraction to be as close to one as possible. Clearly, one cannot eliminate all articles and prepositions, but this helps the mathematically-oriented students to understand the power of revision.
• I use student-produced sentences to continue modeling this exercise.

Assessment

• I require students to practice this strategy on one paragraph of their next few essays. Eventually, students eliminate meaningless words automatically.