Lesson Plan: Peer/Group Sentence Surgery
(Casey Miller, Anthropology Department)
Objective: To help students improve their writing style by holding a peer/group sentence
surgery. Actual sentences volunteered or selected from students’ writing will be shared and
worked on as a class. (What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?)
Total Estimated Time: 45-60 minutes (flexible).
Work Completed Before Class: Students will have completed one or more writing assignments.
Sentences from a previous assignment will be selected by the TA from each student’s writing to
be used for this exercise (though during the exercise itself students will be asked to volunteer
their sentences for the group surgery). (The TA can also select funny examples of ridiculous
sentences from other classes for comedic and cathartic value.)
1. Briefly outline the exercise to the class. Encourage an environment of group solidarity: we all
have written sentences in our careers as writers that even our mothers couldn’t be proud of. The
goal of today’s exercise is to share some of our worst sentences, to laugh together as a group, and
then to get busy making them better.
2. Go over some common sentence sicknesses you have observed in your students’ writing (can
include things like grammatical or punctuation problems, vagueness, wordiness, pretentiousness,
awkward or unclear phrasing, ambiguous pronoun usage, poor word choice or diction issues,
passive voice, run-on sentences, etc.). (5 minutes)
3. Present a few examples of terrible sentences from published (possibly famous) academics to
the class. (Good examples can often be found from the likes of Bourdieu and Butler). These
sentences are good to laugh at, and help students realize that even famous academics write bad
sentences! Ask students to volunteer to read the sentences out lout to the class, and discuss with
the students what makes these sentences bad. (5 minutes)
4. Pass out a handout you have prepared before class with a sentence from each one of your
students (without names). Each (numbered) sentence should have something about it that could
be improved – the problems can be obvious (and taken from the list above) or not so obvious.
Stress to students that everyone has a sentence on the sheet, and that some sentences are quite
good, but even they can be improved through some revision.
5. Break the students up into small groups, and assign each group a certain number of sentences.
Ask them to try to identify why you selected the sentence (how it could be improved) and ask
them to make edits. (10 minutes)
6. Reassemble as a class and ask each group to present 2-3 sentences, including the original and
corrected version. You can prepare a powerpoint in advance with all the questions, which you
can then edit according to the students’ suggestions. You can discuss the original sentence and
the corrections with the students as you go along. (25-40 minutes depending on how many
sentences/groups you want to correct/discuss)