Poetry Island essays were returned today and used as mentor text for our lesson on sentence fragments and run-on sentences. Mrs. Scales explained that of the 90 possible points on the essay, 60 came from the writing score, 10 from the use of the rubric, and 20 from following the directions of the assignment. Some students lost points in the later because they did not use the correct font or formatting that we have been required to use all year. Mrs. Scales pointed out that this is information that can be found on the yellow handout in the front of our English binders and has not changed since the first day of this school year.

Back to the lesson: A run-on sentence is two or more complete sentences written as though they were one sentence. Run on sentences can be corrected in one of three ways:
1) joining the complete sentences with a semicolon
2) joining the complete sentences with a comma and coordinating conjunction such as and.
3) breaking the run-on into separate sentences.

Example: Whitman was a poet, his poems depict American life.
1) Whitman was a poet; his poems depict American life.
2) Whitman was a poet, and his poems depict American life.
3) Whitman was a poet. His poems depict American life.

A.J. allowed us to use the following example from his essay:

What I have learned about Edgar Allen Poe is that he likes sad and Gothic types of poems that are dark and a little disturbing, he was a raging alcoholic and died from alcohol, he was spy but no one knows for sure what type of spy which I thought was very interesting and weird since he was a poet.

What I have learned about Edgar Allen Poe is that he likes sad and Gothic types of poems that are dark and a little disturbing. He was a raging alcoholic and died from alcohol. He was spy, but no one knows for sure what type of spy, which I thought was very interesting and weird since he was a poet.

A sentence fragment expresses only a partial thought and can not stand alone as a complete sentence because it is missing the subject, the verb, or both. We found plenty of these to also fix in our writing.

Mrs. Scales reminded us that our root word review presentations begin tomorrow, and that everyone must be ready if their word is called out.

Anyone who wants to order books for April must bring the order in this week.

The rest of the class time was used as a Writing Workshop day and everyone worked on one of the three pieces of writing that has to be completed this grading period.