Today Hudson continued our writing lesson in the 8th grade Prentice Hall Writing and Grammar curriculum. We moved to the lesson on Maintaining Unity and Coherence in writing paragraphs. We discussed key words: unity and thesis statement. We discussed deleting sentences that do not contribute to the main idea of the paragraph.

Hudson completed Exercise 6, Revising for Unity. He read a paragraph, then marked for deletion sentences which interfere with the unity of the paragraph. We discussed why the sentences do not contribute to the main idea.

We discussed Establishing Coherence and the key word: coherence. We discussed the four organizational strategies: chronological, spatial, comparison and contrast, and cause and effect. We identified transitional words and phrases for each strategy. Hudson completed Exercise 7 Revising for Coherence. He rewrote a paragraph to make it more coherent by adding transitional words and phrases.