Activities for word choice

Teaching students to write in an organized, clear way is one thing. Teaching them to use a variety of words and to improve their word choice is another thing. As many teachers can attest, it can be a tad frustrating to read a students’ final copy and realize that while everything is structurally sound and organized, the writing itself is drab and dull, due to poor word choice.

Over the years, I’ve stumbled upon some great strategies and activities to help students make better decisions with word choice. Once your learners have completed a few of these exercises, you will see a positive change in their writing. What was once tiring to read will now be explosive and powerful!

Ready to give it a try? Choose one of these word choice activities:

1.  Be a word collector.  Students are great at collecting things! From baseball cards to rocks to virtual pets, children enjoy collecting and organizing things. Encourage them to start a collection of words. You’ll be surprised at how much they enjoy building their assortment of new vocabulary once they get started! Meg from The Teacher Studio wrote a guest blog post at Corkboard Connections on 5 ways to get started with helping your students become word collectors. By creating vocabulary charts as a class and making those charts easily accessible to students, you are creating an environment that encourages students to be word collectors and cultivators.  Students can also create their own mini thesauruses where they keep lists of their newly-found words. Then, when they are writing an essay or paragraph, they can use their charts and notebooks to use words from their collections!

2.  Bury dead words.  Students love creating a cemetery where they put old, tired words, such as “said” or “big” to rest. Hope from Elementary Shenanigans created a Dead Word Zone using an entire wall of her classroom. Students found synonyms for overused words and added them on yellow paper surrounding the tombstones of the dead words. I love the way her wall looks! Check out her post here.

3.  Highlight Five. This is a strategy I have used in my fifth grade classroom with a great deal of success. After students finish their rough drafts, meet with me to conference, and write a better copy, they begin the “Highlight 5” stage of writing. For this exercise, each student is required to highlight 5 overused, replaceable words on their paper. They then use a thesaurus to find better choices for the words they have highlighted. If the thesaurus is not helpful to them, students also have the option of looking at a word wall or asking a neighbor for suggestions. I love how much this simple action improves each students’ writing!

4.  Use Picture Thesauruses.  Cinnamon’s Synonyms has a ton of great ideas for expanding students’ vocabulary. One method she has found to be very helpful is having her students use picture thesauruses (which she created–SO amazing!). She hangs these handy little thesauruses from rings on a cork board. Young authors are welcome to get up and use the ring they need when they are working on a piece of writing. Perfect!

5.  Identify Shades of Meaning.  Just as there are a variety of hues for each color of the rainbow, there are an assortment of synonyms for different words. Each word’s synonyms, however, have a range of strength. One exercise that my students complete is called “Shades of Meaning.” They love this activity, and the end result makes an eye-catching bulletin board display that students can use to continue improving their writing! For the activity, you can either go to your local home improvement store and get a variety of paint chip samples, or you can print out some samples at home or school. I use the ones included in my “Shades of Meaning” packet, but really, any paint strips will work. Simply write a basic word, such as “scary” or “small” on the top box of the strip. Then use a thesaurus to list 8 synonyms. At this point, I have students circle 3 of those words of varying degrees of strength. Students then fill in the bottom 3 boxes of the paint strip using those words. A great activity with powerful results!

Once you have introduced a few of these strategies to your students and spend some time practicing them, your students will begin making better word choices in their writing without too much prompting. The results are worth the investment! 

Here’s Some More Great Tips for Teaching Writing!

• Great Daily Writing Activities
• Monthly Language Arts Activities

Why do writers use some words and not others? This lesson looks at word choice options, both grammatical and semantic.

Goals

• Explore possible word choices for some example sentences.
• Identify the grammatical restrictions on word choice in particular examples.
• Identify the semantic restrictions on word choice in particular examples.

Lesson Plan

In this resource we will have a look at some examples of different writers’ work and think about some of the reasons why particular words might have been chosen. To do this we will think about some of the choices available to writers and some of the grammatical patterns that have an impact on those choices.

Activity 1 can be found in the menu entitled ‘This Unit’ on the upper right part of this page, and can be displayed on a projector or smart board. This activity walks you through a discussion of three example sentences, reproduced below. Students should first think about what words might go in each slot. Their knowledge of the world and society, and of word meaning, as well as their implicit knowledge of grammar, will all influence their decisions.

• She

  wore

  the

  most

  beautiful

  BLANK

• After

  the

  rain

  had

  stopped

  we

  BLANK

• The

  things

  they

  had

  shouted

  made

  him

  very

  BLANK

Whatever word they have used to fill each gap, there will be grammatical limitations on what will work, as well as limitations connected to meaning and what is normal in our society.

The next slides explore what is acceptable grammatically and semantically. Go over these slides before class and then use them to walk through the key points with your students.

In Activity 2, also accessible in the right hand menu, students are presented with two text extracts and asked how the writer may have chosen his or her words. The extracts appear below, and on the activity slides.

My earliest memories are a confusion of hilly fields and dark, damp stables, and rats that scampered along the beams above my head. But I remember well enough the day of the horse sale. The terror of it stayed with me all my life.

_{From Michael Morpurgo, Warhorse}

What you might have noticed with this extract is that the author uses a mixture of adjectives, abstract nouns and verbs to precisely paint a very visual picture of his narrator’s memories. The use of the adjectives hilly, dark, and damp as part of two noun phrases helps describe the scene clearly, while the use of the superlative adjective earliest shows us that this is the first memory the narrator has. Could nouns have replaced these adjectives? Verbs? How about hilliest or darkest instead of hilly and dark? The verb scampered is effective, because it captures the movement of the rats, while two abstract nouns, confusion and terror, convey the central feelings related to the memories. Could adjectives or adverbs have replaced those nouns?

An exceptionally funny and generous book that is also a tightly plotted detective novel.

_{From Louis Sachar, Holes}

In this extract, the positive impression is created by adjectives and adverbs. The book is described using the adjectives funny and generous, while they are modified by the adverb exceptionally. Another adverb, tightly, is used to modify the adjective plotted in the noun phrase a tightly plotted detective novel. What other words could the writer have chosen? What other word classes could the writer have chosen?