The SOL for eleventh-grade English requires students to focus their writing through extensive pre-writing. Give your students a chance to practice clear pre-writing techniques using the buddy-writing activity. Match students up into pairs and provide each partner with a different research topic. Ask the students to write out a plan for their paper including a brief list of credible and applicable resources. Have the students exchange pre-writing plans with their partners and write brief one-page papers following the other students' plans.
The Department of Education expects that eleventh-grade students can adapt content, vocabulary, voice and tone to fit different audiences, purposes and situations. Three-write is a rewriting activity that helps students focus on rewording each sentence of a paper to fit a new purpose. Provide students with a short expository essay consisting of three to five paragraphs. Give students three different audiences or situations for which they need to rewrite the essay. Ask students to rewrite each paragraph three times to fit the different audiences you provided.
Whether continuing on to higher education or entering the workforce, students in the eleventh-grade need to know how to revise and edit correspondence for personal and professional purposes. Introduce students to various correspondence formats such as the cover letter, letter of inquiry or business letter. Have students write a correspondence following a script that you provide. Include a prompt to write at least one verbal phrase. Exchange correspondences between students so no student has his own letter. Display a list of copyediting symbols on an overhead and ask students to use the symbols to correct grammar, capitalization, punctuation, spelling and sentence structure. Ask students to underline all verbals (such as gerunds, like "running") and verbal phrases.
Proper citation is key to any well-written research paper. Eleventh-grade students should be able to follow various style guides (such as the MLA or APA) to format and document their research projects. Have each student bring in three to five books and articles to cite. Ask the students to write out work cited pages according to both MLA and APA formats. Check work cited pages to verify that entries are in alphabetical order and follow the guide-specific format. Ask students how a reader could locate material included on a work cited page. Discuss what the different formats emphasize. For example, APA lists the date of publication toward the beginning of the entry while MLA includes the date of publication nearer the end.