develop drafts into a focused, structured, and coherent piece of writing by:
organizing with purposeful structure, including an introduction, transitions, coherence within and across paragraphs, and a conclusion; and
developing an engaging idea reflecting depth of thought with specific facts, details, and examples;
revise drafts for clarity, development, organization, style, word choice, and sentence variety;
edit drafts using standard English conventions, including:
complete complex sentences with subject-verb agreement and avoidance of splices, run-ons, and fragments;
consistent, appropriate use of verb tenses and active and passive voice;
prepositions and prepositional phrases and their influence on subject-verb agreement;
pronoun-antecedent agreement;
correct capitalization;
punctuation, including commas in nonrestrictive phrases and clauses, semicolons, colons, and parentheses; and
correct spelling, including commonly confused terms such as its/it's, affect/effect, there/their/they're, and to/two/too; and
publish written work for appropriate audiences.
compose literary texts such as personal narratives, fiction, and poetry using genre characteristics and craft;
compose informational texts, including multi-paragraph essays that convey information about a topic, using a clear controlling idea or thesis statement and genre characteristics and craft;
compose multi-paragraph argumentative texts using genre characteristics and craft; and
compose correspondence that reflects an opinion, registers a complaint, or requests information in a business or friendly structure.
generate student-selected and teacher-guided questions for formal and informal inquiry;
develop and revise a plan;
identify and gather relevant information from a variety of sources;
differentiate between primary and secondary sources;
synthesize information from a variety of sources;
differentiate between paraphrasing and plagiarism when using source materials;
examine sources for:
reliability, credibility, and bias, including omission; and
faulty reasoning such as bandwagon appeals, repetition, and loaded language;
display academic citations and use source materials ethically; and
use an appropriate mode of delivery, whether written, oral, or multimodal, to present results.