Improving Your Writing with Emily Dickinson (3) – Independent Practice with Verbs

How can you help a student to improve their writing?  There are so many of us trying to do this, whether we are an English tutor, a parent home schooling, or a teacher.

You can read the first two posts in this series, which have been looking at the importance of verbs,  here (1) and here (2). 

Today’s post will show how a student can take really simple and straightforward sentences and transform it just by thinking about verbs.

Here’s the simple and straightforward sentences, on a similar theme to the Emily Dickinson writing I used for the first two posts:

A bird flew down onto path. It sat there for a bit then flew away.

The verbs are the doing words, and I’ve underlined them in the next example:

A bird flew down onto the path. It sat there for a bit then flew away.

I’m now going to focus on using more interesting verbs, and change a few other things, and I hope it will make a much better piece of writing…

A bird appeared on the path today. It bobbed and fussed, never remaining still for long, dashing off into the nearby foliage before returning just as quickly – then suddenly it was gone!

This is an easy activity students can do with any short piece of text.

Can you think of different verbs that could have been used instead of mine?

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