18 Sentences – Text Forms

Category:           Sentences

Concept:            Examining Text Forms and Sentence Structure

Connections to The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1-8: Language (2023):

_____B2. Language Foundations for Reading and Writing

__________B2.2 Vocabulary (grades 4-8)

_____B3. Language Conventions for Reading and Writing

__________B3.1 Syntax and Sentence Structure

Prior Knowledge:

• Understanding sentence types and forms
• Understanding that a writer creates meaning for an intended audience and purpose, explored through mentor texts
• Understanding there are a variety of texts forms and genres to express meaning (see definition below)

What’s the definition?

Genre:

The types or categories into which texts are grouped. For example, literary genres include: novel, short story, essay, poetry, and drama.

 Text form:

A category or type of text that has certain defining characteristics. The concept of text forms provides a way for readers, listeners, viewers, and creators to think about the purpose of a text and its intended audience. Most texts are of multiple forms (e.g., a comic strip is a visual text that may also be narrative, expository, literary).

Text forms include but are not limited to:

• Descriptive. A descriptive text provides an account or representation of a person, object, or event, using descriptive or figurative language.
• Expository. An expository text explains something, providing evidence, or uses a text pattern such as comparison and contrast, or cause and effect. A narrative exposition provides factual background information within a story. Also called an explanatory text.
• Functional. A functional text is any text that is useful in daily life; it usually includes information that helps the reader, listener, or viewer make decisions and complete tasks.
• Informational. An informational text informs the reader, listener, or viewer about a specific topic. This term is also used to describe any non-literary text.
• Literary. A literary text is a text created to tell a story or to entertain. Its primary purpose is usually aesthetic, but it may also contain political messages or beliefs.
• Narrative. A narrative text tells a story or recounts a series of connected events. A personal narrative is told from the first-person point of view.
• Persuasive. A persuasive text attempts to convince or influence the reader, listener, or viewer to do or believe something. An argument aims to persuade others that an action or idea is right or wrong, using logic and providing evidence.
• Procedural. A procedural text describes procedures or how to do something.
• Report. A report gives an account of something observed, heard, done, or investigated.
• Visual. A visual text is an image, or a text in which images may play a major role.

Conventions:

Accepted practices or rules in the use of language, and of features in a text form or genre. Some conventions help convey meaning (e.g., punctuation and grammar in written texts); some describe accepted practices in a genre (e.g., the main characters in children’s books should be children or animals; locations in horror films should be dark and secluded) and some describe rules for the presentation of content (e.g., sizes of margins and indents in an academic essay). Oral, written, visual, and multimodal texts each have their own conventions that influence the way we interpret their meanings.

Style:

A manner of writing, speaking, or representing. In a literary work, style usually refers to distinctive characteristics of the word choice, figurative language, literary devices, language patterns, and sentence structures of the work. In other forms, a creator’s distinctive style is the sum of all the stylistic elements and devices they consistently use.

The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1-8: Language (2023)

What does it look/sound like?

As the definitions above indicate, text forms are in part defined by the types of sentences and the style used within them. As such, finding and sharing mentor text examples with your students can help them understand the connection between their intended meaning, their audience, and the text form that would best communicate their message.

The list below can be a starting point for finding a variety of text forms to share with your students.

Why does it matter?

Identifying sentence structure types and forms can be an integral part of exploring text forms and genres. For example, using mentor texts allows students to learn to associate sentence forms with intended audiences and intended meanings or purposes. Examine these text forms and genres. Consider the type of writing that helps define them.

• fiction
• non-fiction
• blogs
• podcasts
• email
• text
• video scripts and transcripts
• newspapers
• infographics
• public service announcements
• resumes
• cover letters, and many more real-world examples

How do I teach this?

Explore sentence structures in different genre by providing or displaying short passages from different genres and text forms as mentor text excerpts (e.g., a formal report, a personal narrative, a persuasive ad, a social media post, a commercial and transcript, etc).

Have students identify the dominant sentence structures used and discuss why they are effective for that genre, for the writer’s intended audience and purpose in order to convey intended meaning.

As an additional step, create a Writing Challenge (could use a “Spin-the-Wheel Writing Challenge”or Digital Randomizer).

Use different text form categories, such as storytelling, persuasion, social media post, text message, etc., to have students write according to certain genres and prompts.

Students can also share their writing and have peers guess the genre based on the student’s writing sample.

In their reading and text consumption, have students identify the intended audience and purpose for the text, and demonstrate their reasoning. Have them also highlight sentences in the text that are commonly used in the text form being examined.

In their own writing and text creation, have students articulate their intended audience and purpose, and reflect on how their stylistic decisions (sentences types and forms, content, vocabulary and diction, etc) helped convey a clear message to their intended audience and purpose.

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Online Resources:

Writing with your Audience in Mind video (3:06 min) provides a useful overview of audience and purpose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyH79KQET5E