English Writing 101 Chapter 1

Capitalization Rules pg. 7-8 of textbook The first word in a sentence The pronoun I Abbreviations and acronyms formed from the first letter of words (USA, KSA) All proper nouns. Some proper nouns include: Names of people and their titles, nationalities, specific places, days/months/holidays, names of specific organizations

Exercise 1B on page 8 Please change the small letters to capital letters where necessary: I would like to introduce my classmate roberto sanchez. he is from the beautiful island of puerto rico in the caribbean sea. roberto is twenty-one years old. he was born in san juan, the capital city. his native language is spanish. he studied english in elementary school and in high school, too. roberto comes from a large family. he has three older brothers and two younger sisters. he likes to play the electric bass. he and some friends have a small band. sometimes they play on saturday night at the fantasia club on fourth street in downtown san jose. baseball is his favorite sport. the san francisco giants are his favorite team.

Sentence Structure A sentence is a group of words that contains at least one subject and one verb and expresses a complete thought. For now, let’s focus on simple sentences (there are four different kinds of sentences in English).

Simple Sentences A simple sentence has one subject-verb pair. The subject tells who or what did something. The verb tells the action (jump, work, think) or condition (is, was, seem, appear). Examples (subjects in bold and verbs in italics): Filmmaker George Lucas has changed the film industry in many ways. One new technology was a special computer-assisted camera crane.

Simple Sentences Simple sentences can have one of many “formulas” or may be written in different order. Here are some examples: The Star Wars movies were international hits. This example is in subject verb order. Young people and adults enjoyed them. This example is in subject subject verb order because there are two subjects and one verb. The films entertained and thrilled audiences everywhere. This example is in subject verb verb order because there is one subject and two verbs. Luke Skywalker and his friends battled evil and made us laugh at the same time. This example is in subject subject verb verb order because there are two subjects and two verbs.

Subject Verb Agreement Subjects and verbs must agree in number. Examples: My sister is married.(singular) My sisters are married. (plural) My brother and I are single. (plural)

Fragments In English, you MUST ALWAYS have at least one subject and one verb in every sentence. If you leave out either the subject or the verb, your sentence is not complete. We call incomplete sentences fragments. Fragments are sentence errors.

Fragments Here are examples of fragments: Is not easy to get an A in Professor Wilson’s class. People in New York always in a hurry. To correct sentence 1, you must add a subject: It is not easy to get an A in Professor Wilson’s class. To correct sentence 2, you must add a verb: People in New York are always in a hurry.

Practice Correcting Fragments Please turn to page 15 of the textbook. Please take out a piece of paper (include your name, student ID#, and class name at the top) and complete practice 4. For those sentences already complete, write complete. For those sentences that are fragments write fragment, then write the sentence correctly.

Practice correcting Fragments Let’s edit or correct this paragraph as a class. There are five fragments in the paragraph below. My best friend is Suzanne. We have been friends since childhood. As children we lived next door to each other in Caracas. Now live in different countries on different continents. She is married to a Venezuelan. Has three children. Her son two years old, and her twin daughters three months old. We haven’t seen each other for eight years. We keep in touch by e-mail. Also telephone each other at least once a month. We will be friends forever.

10 MIN BREAK

The Writing Process Writing is never a one-step action. The process of writing has roughly four steps. Create ideas – prewriting Organize ideas – make an outline Write the rough draft – use your outline as a guide Edit or correct your rough draft to finish your work

Writing Step 1: Prewriting Prewriting is a way to get ideas. In this step, you choose a topic and collect ideas to explain the topic. One way to get writing ideas is by listing. This is when you write the topic at the top of the paper and then quickly make a list of the words or phrases that come into your mind. On page 16, we can see the example of listing on the topic of a person who has made a difference. We can see that after the writer made his first list, he chose to write about his grandfather. Then after choosing his grandfather, he decided on which part of his grandfather he would write about.

Step 2: Organizing After finishing your lists, the next step in the writing process is to organize your ideas into a simple outline. An outline helps the writer to put her thoughts into the order they will be written. We can see from the model at the bottom of page 17 how the writer put the points he was going to write about in order. He will then write his paragraph according to the order of his outline.

Step 3: Writing In the third step, you write the rough draft or the first copy of your paragraph. The outline helps you write your paragraph by reminding you of each point you wanted to make to support your topic sentence. In this step, don’t worry about trying to make your paragraph perfect, just write your ideas in sentences down on paper and fix your errors in the final draft. We can see a model of the rough draft on page 18. Please notice that the writer included some ideas that weren’t in the outline and that he added a concluding sentence at the end.

Step 4: Polishing: Revising and Editing In this last step, you polish or improve your writing by adding the finishing touches. First, fix any problems with the content of the writing or how you have the paragraph organized. Then work on the smaller problems of grammar and punctuation. You can use the worksheets on pages 198-207 to help you polish your writing. We can see the model of this final draft on page 19.