AFESC-Building Better Writers from the Sentence Up

Students are expected to respond to rigorous writing prompts — including those aligned to Arkansas ATLAS — with clear claims, developed ideas, and coherent multi-paragraph essays.
But many students cannot consistently write a complete sentence.
When students struggle with clauses, sentence boundaries, and sentence variety, it doesn’t just affect grammar — it limits idea development, organization, and overall performance on extended writing tasks. Weak sentence construction quietly undermines students’ ability to fully demonstrate their thinking.
This session focuses on explicit instruction in syntax — the bridge between reading comprehension and written expression. Grounded in research on language development and aligned to the demands of ATLAS writing tasks, we’ll explore how sentence-level instruction strengthens both comprehension and composition by helping students understand how language works.