Improving Sentence Writing Ability through Sentence-Combining Practice

Aftermastering this feat, they move on to cre-ating sentences that declare, question,or exclaim. Finally, they string togetherenough sentences to qualify as a para-graph and then a short story. But thisprocess can be derailed when youngwriters encounter the challenges ofwriting sentences.Creating well constructed sentencesis challenging for most writers. For lessskilled writers, including writers withlearning disabilities (LD), it can be evenmore difficult. These writers generallyproduce less syntactically complex sen-tences that contain more grammaticalerrors (Myklebust, 1973). They mayalso produce sentences that are shorter;have higher percentages of capitaliza-tion, punctuation, and spelling errors;and are lower in overall quality thanthose of their aver-age-achieving peers(Graham & Harris,1989; Myklebust).Anderson (1982)suggests that lessskilled writers havemore missing sub-jects and verbs intheir writing thanregularly achievingstudents, and more often overuse theconnector

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