Everyone Reads Their Favourite Sentence

When I’ve finished with my brief comments (much, much briefer than all that explanation in the section above), I ask every learner to look at the piece again and to underline their favourite sentence. I underline my favourite, too. Then, because I want the author to be the last to read, I start with the learner next to them and we go around the room, each person in turn reading out their favourite sentence. (If we’re sharing writing on a screen, I ask learners to jot down the first and last words of their favourite sentence, so they commit to one before they hear the others read.)

I take my turn to read my favourite wherever I come in the circle because my choice is no more important than anyone else’s choice.

I ask them to read the whole sentence, from period to period, not just the words they like best. This requires them to pay attention again to sentences and periods, but it is a situation where they can’t go wrong: Find two dots on the page, and read what’s between them.

Sometimes the author gives us a run-on sentence that has a period missing in the middle, for example: “My husband fell asleep in the middle of the show I gave him a poke in the ribs when it was over.” Some people choose to read the whole thing as their favourite sentence. Others will mentally insert the period and choose to read either the first part or the second. Nobody bats an eye. Neither do I.

I give people the option to give a brief reason for their choice as they read their sentence, and sometimes they do. As time goes by, I hear more learners giving their reasons, echoing the kind of analysis I’ve been doing. (When many learners start giving reasons for their choice, I know that we are ready to move on to the advanced writing group where learners take more responsibility for analyzing why something is good.)

What if a learner only wants to criticize?

Sometimes nearly everyone picks the same sentence, and the power of that sentence echoes  in the room as it is read out time and time again. Sometimes the piece is only one sentence long, and the author gets to hear it read out over and over again. Sometimes there are so many good sentences that many different ones are picked as favourites. That is also good for the writer to hear.

For the writer who has just read, this is the last few minutes of basking in positive feedback They hear sentences they have written read out with warm approval, one after another. They hear the cadence of their own good language in the voices of other learners.

Then we go on to the next learner’s work, and we do the same thing with that piece: the learner reads, I comment specifically on a couple of things that are well written, and every learner picks a favourite sentence and reads it out loud. It’s a simple pattern, but very satisfying on many levels.

What if two learners pick the same sentence?