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Critque this please.....I need to know if dd is writing well enough.


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I just found this subforum and I thought I would post something that dd has written in the past month. She is sixth grade (not quite 12 years old) and just finishing IEWA. This one she shared orally so the final polishing has not been done. We will get to that.

 

 

What's the difference

 

Early Greek people ate very much the same food as we do. For example a tipical Grecian breakfast would include goat's milk and barley bread while we might have cow's milk and toast spread with butter. What do you normally have for dinner? Chances are it would not be much different from what the early Greeks would eat. A grecian dinner would have pork, beef, peas, onions and rye bread, cheese, olive oil, and huny. No strange food there! As in most homes in the 21st century greek familys would wash their hands before eating. It was very importand because they did not have forks or spoons to eat with. They also did not have napkins so they used dough instead. That's right, Greek people used dough for napkins. Although greeks had some different customs than us, we all ate and eat very much the same food.

 

Seems that there maybe some punctuation in there that I missed due to the crossing out. The last sentance seemed stilted because of the IEW instruction to repeat and reflect two to three key works. I would have her go back over that to help get it smoother with the tense. It is based on a HOD writing exercise 5-8 sentences long....she has written longer ones when following exercises in writing with IEW.

 

What do you think? Please be ruthless......I need to know the truth, even if it is painful.

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Her paragraph starts with a good topic sentence and is well organized. She does have some spelling mistakes. She missed a comma after "For example" and "As in most homes in the 21st century". I thought that her style is interesting and varied. I'd say that she's doing quite well but needs some help learning to proofread her work - especially for spelling mistakes.

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Her paragraph starts with a good topic sentence and is well organized. She does have some spelling mistakes. She missed a comma after "For example" and "As in most homes in the 21st century". I thought that her style is interesting and varied. I'd say that she's doing quite well but needs some help learning to proofread her work - especially for spelling mistakes.

 

Thank you, Jean.

 

I have not spent much time with her polishing this one, but truthfully I do not feel confident in this area. I am so pleased that she learned how to organize her paragraph with IEW since being able to do this was something that helped me in university so many years ago.

 

I often wish I could write more myself just so I can cement the rules before I try to help her learn them but all of that requires time and feedback for me as well. I also wish I had a quiet space without my youngest talking in the backround. My brain gets so distracted.

 

Thank you!

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If you need a quick reference guide for yourself, I love to use Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I keep it by me when I am teaching my children to edit their writing. We look up particular things and see how they should be punctuated, etc.

Good luck!

 

 

Thank you! That does look good.

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Overall it is a straightforward, if conversational, paragraph. The parallel structure in the breakfast comparison is very well done.

 

The topic sentence is about the food, but the paragraph discusses hand washing and napkins as well as food. Your daughter might want to consider expanding her topic sentence to cover all the ideas in the paragraph, or trim the paragraph to focus on just the food.

 

I also agree that the concluding sentence is clunky. The phrase "ate and eat" is awkward. The phrase "very much the same food" is repeated from the topic sentence. How about rephrasing the last sentence to include a new twist, such as how a modern person might feel eating the food of the early Greeks (or vice versa)?

 

She does need more practice with spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.

Edited by Kuovonne
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