New Tips And Triks For You

Details Published Date Thursday, 09 January 2014 18:18 Written by Telly Halkias

In the post-Vietnam era, American education has taken a turn that hasn't quite allowed it to get back on track. One of the areas most affected is basic English writing. In the push towards self-esteem and creativity, we find many students who consider themselves "good writers" and feel their work should be compared favorably with the next great American novel.

Not so fast. Today, teachers everywhere are trying to reintroduce rigor into writing instruction. Sometimes the most lasting lessons in formal education come in the smallest form.

So along with tough but fair grading on papers, the following is my (sneaky) contribution to the cause, disguised as a weekly classroom game of sorts: Words of the Week.

Having taught college writing classes on and off for years, I don't recall how I came up with this drill, a recurring tool to improve my students' command of the English language.

Whether teaching online or in a classroom, Words of the Week is effective because of its packaging: simple in its presentation, yet tougher in its execution. At the start of each week's class, I pose three words with the following instructions: "Please use one of the following words, or a proper English form of it, in an original sentence."

Sounds simple, right?

For example, the three words I used once were: "apologist," "banal," and "demarcate." The choice isn't haphazard. Each week, I offer up a noun, adjective or adverb, and a verb. They aren't run-of-the-mill words such as "man," "angry," or "run." They must be lesser used, and colorful.

First responses are telling. It's easy to find lazy students almost right away. They're the ones who won't look up the word in a dictionary, but just take a stab at a sentence and try to end the drill. Such a student would offer up: "The apologist was sorry he ran the red light."

While an apologist may indeed regret a traffic violation, this effort fell short on two points. The first is the definition. According to Merriam-Webster, an apologist is "one who speaks or writes in defense of someone or something."

This brings up the second, more germane point of Words of the Week. It's not enough that the word in question is used properly. In follow-on instructions, I add: "Make this word's meaning understandable to a hypothetical reader that doesn't already know it. Write the rest of your sentence descriptively so as to flesh out that meaning without actually repeating the definition verbatim."

So there's the light bulb moment. Sometimes students work through a half dozen iterations of their sentences to make the word's meaning known without being obvious. It's not an easy journey, but it takes them down a road paved with the riches of English.

After going back and forth on several attempts for our second word, "banal," which means "lacking originality, freshness, or novelty," a student came up with the following sentence: "The banality of his stage repertoire made the audience groan; he tipped his top hat and twirled his cane."

That's dynamite stuff. We also work on wordiness, punctuation and other issues, but only after having the word's meaning down pat.

Then there are those students who grasp the routine instinctively and come out with guns blazing. The last word, "demarcate," which means "to delimit; to fix or define the limits of," provided that fodder when one student sent this effort forward in less than a minute: "We demarcated our property with metal pins, making it easy to find the boundaries." Not bad!

There are as many ways to teach writing to students at all educational levels as there are English teachers. In that light, Words of the Week is by no means definitive or groundbreaking. Rather, it's peculiar but effective: a sentence-long tutorial that uncovers linguistic nuggets in the short space it takes to describe an interesting word.

Mechanics and usage, which many claim have fallen out of vogue in the name of flair and style, remain the foundation of sound writing. I have no idea when I started using Words of the Week. But at the end of a course, my students always mention it as a helpful way to dole out dozens of English lessons, all from the effort of trying to fit one word into one sentence.

The next great American novel can wait, methinks.

(Telly Halkias is an award-winning freelance journalist from Portland's West End. You may contact him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or follow him on Twitter at @TellyHalkias.)