A new way to enjoy writing—counting words in sentences     049

The importance of writing, as a subject at school, is certainly well understood and appreciated. Not only is it a key learning outcome in English, the skill of writing is essential for nearly all other subjects. Later, in college and university, writing is how students are assessed, and so it has been since students, teaching and examinations were invented.

The methods whereby a student’s writing can be improved seem far less obvious. Often parents come to me saying something like, “Oh, his writing needs to be improved… it’s the essay questions, you know.” Nearly always when this happens the student has been scoring disappointing marks in English assessment tasks. Where possible I always also check the performance in subjects such as history, which heavily depend upon essay writing skills. The solution usually involves more than just how to write an essay answer—which just by itself is quite involved. Strangely it always seems to be the mother who states that the child’s writing skills are not good enough. In contrast students typically state that they are not doing so well in English. They themselves rarely place the blame upon their writing skills.

In this blog post I want to talk about just one aspect of writing which steadily improves over time, and which is quite noticeable especially with younger children. This is the increase in children’s ability to be able to write sentences, particularly sentences which are longer and syntactically correct. Now so far in this blog post I have been writing in sentences which are of moderate length, about 20 words per sentence, which is a little longer than in most easy-to-read newspapers. As you can see the length of sentences varies, and indeed if this didn’t happen the text would be boring to read. Sometimes sentences can be quite short. Actually the length of sentences was researched in the United States during the mid-1960s, according to Martin Cutts’s The Plain English Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 12). After studying million words of published US writing the researchers found the average sentence length was 19 words. For government, scientific and scholarly articles the length was 24-25 words, and for general newspaper reports, 21 words. I think that these figures probably have changed very little.

As a parent however you might want to see such figures change as your son or daughter matures in their writing. So why not have some fun and get a pencil out and start counting how many words per sentence your child produces. May I suggest a few things before you start. Many variables influence sentence length such as the type of writing, the length of writing, the mood in which your child happened to be in when writing, and just plain circumstances. In short, many things can be influencing how many words your child is writing, and most of them having nothing to do with writing ability. So the first principle is that quite a few sentences should be counted. In my experience, at least 100 sentences are needed to comprise just one measurement. One hundred sentences are likely to average out many of the variables and thus achieve better reliability.

In counting the words per sentence I score a sentence ‘0’ if it is not a sentence. There are a number of ways that this can happen but most commonly the child has forgotten a capital letter, or a full stop, or has failed to write a complete sequence or unit of thought. Obviously, within a set of 100 sentences, the more failures the lower the number of words per sentence on average. So this scoring method measures both the length of sentences and also the ability to write correct sentences, and as the child progresses these two things are related.

So, get out your pencil and start counting. Oh, and another thing. You should only count sentences when they are in an organised group of sentences, that is, part of a longer piece of writing. A sentence answer to a comprehension question for example may be artificially long, and quite an unrepresentative. Sentences containing lists of items, likewise, should be excluded. We also don’t need sentences with dialogue.

At the beginning of a school year, say in March, your first sentence measurement of hundred words might yield an average score of 8.9 words. Later, as the school year progresses, you can expect the average score to also progress. Perhaps after a while a second set of 100 sentences could average out at say 9.1 or even 10.0. Over time, especially with older children, you can expect improvement increments to be fairly small. Sometimes children may remain more or less at the same level for quite some time.

The whole point of this is so that you and the student can take pleasure in this aspect of writing improvement. Ironically if your son or daughter deliberately tries to write longer sentences then the result will be worse because the more complex sentences will collapse in on themselves. No, improvement comes about from an increase in writing fluency, becoming more careful about punctuation, and by thinking of more complex ideas. So, your child may start with, ‘I saw a cat.’ but over time this could be ‘The large cat slept on the lounge.’ and so on.

With the children I teach English I routinely make these sentence measurements. Children typically take pleasure in this and so the second 100 sentences measured can show a five to ten per cent improvement. Most students show a steady upward trend in the average figures collected, as the months, and years go by. In my experience very young children, in say Year 1 can scarcely manage 3 or 4 words per sentence. During primary school, Years 3 to 5, clear steady writing develops with average scores being about 6 to 9 words per sentence. The transition into high school usually brings a notable increase to about 12 words per sentence. Years 8 to 10 mark the beginning of adult level writing, with scores of say 14 to 18 words per sentence.

Beyond this point there would be further maturation, but educationally there would be little or no purpose in making measurements. There are writing issues of far more consequence to be addressed, and counting words is no longer fun. Ironically quite a number of Year 11 and 12 students seem to take pleasure in writing longer and longer sentences, stuffed to the brim with every possible adjective and qualifying phrase. If five words are necessary many children want to write 10. They say that more is better, and if that isn’t bad enough, they usually also say that their teachers expect it. But this is another issue, and I digress, so back to the main topic—the figures achieved by young children.

Actually I hesitate to provide you, dear reader, with these figures. They are certainly not scientifically standardised scores, derived from large population samples. They are intended only to illustrate one way of watching how your child’s writing improves. They are not meant to be regarded as any type of guide to what is normal. Instead you should use the method only from time to time so that your child can take growing pleasure in being more careful with punctuation and in making greater use of describing words, and the like. Of course if your son or daughter consistently has a habit of not making any type of effort in writing then the sentence scores would probably reflect this. Writing is an intellectual activity where full engagement always preferable.

So, something a little different to do. May you and your children enjoy themselves with this.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services