This Lesson's Title:

Antonyms and Comma Splices

Mimicking Charles Dickens, then fixing those punctuation errors

This lesson was created by NNWP Teacher Consultant Corbett Harrison. You can access all of Corbett's on-line lessons by clicking here.

The ideal "mentor text" that can be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author, especially from chapter 1 of the book.

Click here to view this book at Amazon.com.

If you are a Washoe County teacher, click here to search for this book at the county library.

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

For Dickens' opening to his Tale of Two Cities, the author uses one of the longest series of comma splices in the history of literature. While Dickens did this for stylistic effect, student writers often overuse comma splices in reckless ways, with little knowledge of the conjunctions that can be put between two independent ideas. For this assignment, students create their own Dickens-like paragraph, but they are required to find (and punctuate for properly) appropriate conjunctions to sit between their opposites. Teachers: click here to read the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait for this writing assignment is word choice ; after choosing a topic, students first brainstorm interesting antonyms to consider for their paragraphs.  The support trait  for this writing assignment is conventions; students are to use (and punctuate for) three different types of conjunctions in their finished passages.