Help for a confident, but weak writer

[Buildingculture]

Greetings guys, I’m hoping you can weigh in.
 

I love homeschooling and embrace finding curriculum for tricky children. However, I’m a little unsure how to proceed with one of my kids.

My nearly 13 year old daughter is very confident with writing. However, her writing is weak. Repetitive Sentence openers, fragments, run-on, sentences, etc.. When I originally homeschooled my kids, I was into the whole unschooling thing and it’s obvious we missed some basic construction around the third grade Mark. So now she writes me six paragraphs essays with no complaints, but the essays are full of problems in sentence structure.

Do you have a suggestion about how I can help with sentence structure with an older child? The other kids I work with are all moving into classical composition from Veritas in the fall and I don’t think she’s ready unless we can address this. Should I put her in something else? Is there a program we could hit over the summer?

 

she’s scoring incredibly well in her analytical grammar course and reading just fine. It’s just sentence structure.

[forty-two]

It's frustratingly common for students to not automatically apply their formal grammar knowledge to their own writing. 

For starters, can she state the definition of a sentence, and what makes a run-on a run-on, and a fragment a fragment? (I would separate the style issue of technically correct but repetitive openings from the issue of grammatically incorrect run-ons and fragments.)  And can she identify run-on sentences and sentence fragments in isolation, in formal grammar activities?

If she can do that, then can she identify her own run-ons and fragments when you ask her to specifically look for them when editing her writing?  As well, can she fix other people's run-ons and fragments, turn them into grammatical sentences?

If she can do both of those things, can she fix her own run-ons and fragments when you specifically ask her to? 

Since she's doing well in her formal grammar course, she's got a starting point - just have to specifically work on teaching her to apply it to her own writing.

Edited May 11, 2023 by forty-two

[Buildingculture]

Good idea. Maybe I’ll highlight some of the wrong sentences and ask her why they are wrong. It would be encouraging to see some self editing come through.

[pmeilaen]

Building Writing Skills might be helpful in a case like this.  There is also a laminated chart from IEW that might help.