Elaboration

Language Network

Elaboration

Elaboration provides details that help the reader fully understand the topic.

Elaboration

Types of Elaboration

Sensory Details

Facts and Statistics

Elaboration

Sensory details are bits of information that you collect through your five senses.

Sensory Details

touch sight smell tastesound

When you elaborate with sensory details, you give the reader a much clearer idea of what you are describing.

Sensory Details

You can use a word web to help you add sensory details to your writing.

MyFirst Snowfall

Smells like sweet, clean air

Feels like an ice-cream sundae

Tastes like cold cotton candy

Sounds like loud crunching

Looks like the stuffing in pillows

Sensory Details

STUDENT MODELSENSORY DETAILS

SIGHT

TOUCH

SMELL

SOUND

I saw snow for the first time when I was ten... When I looked out the window early one morning, it seemed like someone was shaking the stuffing out of pillows and letting it drift downward. I put on my new boots and ran outside. I was surprised by the noise of my boots crunching on the hard surface of the packed snow…The air smelled clean and sweet. I grabbed a handful of snow. It felt like I was putting my hand into an ice-cream sundae!...

Sensory Details

If you are writing about something that has happened, close your eyes and try to visualize the event.

To gather details about a person or object, make careful observations. Keep a small notebook or journal with you and jot them down.

Sensory Details

Facts are statements that can be proved.

Facts and Statistics

Statistics are facts expressed with one or more numbers.

Statistics can be used to make comparisons between things or between a part of something and the whole.

Facts and Statistics

When you elaborate with facts and statistics, you help your readers understand your ideas.

Facts and Statistics

LITERARY MODELFACTS AND STATISTICS

The final size and richness of this new ship was astounding. She was 882 feet long, almost the length of four city blocks. With nine decks, she was as high as an eleven-story building…

As her name boasted, the Titanic was indeed the biggest ship in the world.

--Robert D. Ballard, Exploring the Titanic

Facts and Statistics

Give your reader comparisons, not just numbers.

Facts and Statistics

Elaborating with Visuals

Diagrams

Other Visuals

Practice and Apply

Elaboration

Using visuals to elaborate is a great way to show rather than tell.

Your reader can see at a glance what information you are giving and how it all fits together.

Elaboration

Diagrams

Diagrams are drawings that give information about an object or a process.

Diagrams

Types of diagrams include

• time lines • flow charts • labeled drawings

1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

Diagrams

Conelayers of hardened, cooled lava and other materials ejected from the volcano

Central vent and side ventmagma flows from the chamber through here

Ash cloudfull of bits of rock and magma (hot, liquid rock)

Magma chambervolcanic eruption happens when magma travels upward and breaks through the earth’s crust

You can elaborate with a diagram.

A volcano is an opening in the crust of the earth where lava, ashes, and gases are released.

Inside a Volcano

Diagrams

Charts and graphs present facts and statistics in a visual format.

They let your reader see and compare information easily.

Other Visuals

STUDENT MODELCHARTS AND GRAPHS

(SEE NEXT SLIDE)

Volcanoes have caused some of the worst natural disasters in history. Lava flows have destroyed whole towns, and people have starved to death because their farmland got covered with ashes and nothing could grow. Over the past 200 years, more than 250,000 people have died because of volcano eruptions. Four huge eruptions caused about 70 percent of those deaths.

Other Visuals

How does this graph elaborate on volcanoes?

STUDENT MODEL CHARTS AND GRAPHS

Deadliest Volcano Eruptions, Late 1700s-Present

Other Visuals

Add sensory details to the following sentence.

Barbara photographed a cactus in the desert.

1.

Practice and Apply

Add sensory details to the following sentence.

The big bear looked menacing.2.

Practice and Apply

Add sensory details to the following sentence.

I remember my first trip to a movie theater.

3.

Practice and Apply

Provide facts or statistics to support the following statement. To see statistics you can use, click here.

Cultures around the world are rapidly becoming part of a global, fast-paced community.

4.

Practice and Apply

• In one California school 32 different languages are spoken by the student body.

• More than one-fifth of the world population speaks English.

• Television took 13 years to acquire 50 million users; within five years, the Internet had 50 million users.

• Russia, China, and India now have some of the same fast- food restaurant chains that the U.S. has.

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Practice and Apply