Systematically teach and have students practice combining and expanding sentences during mini-lessons or writing conferences. This improves the syntactic structure, quality, and style of their sentences.
Call nouns and verbs by their names. A student can’t use more exciting verbs or descriptive nouns in their oral or written language if they can’t identify them. Have students keep a notebook where they keep powerful nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other interesting words and phrases for future reference.
Extensive reading increases students’ awareness and access to grammatically rich and diverse language structures.
Teach and discuss word usage and sentence construction through the context of writing for a specific audience.
Teach grammar such as sentence structure, style, and variety while conferencing with students about editing and revising their writing. (Weaver, 1996)