Beginning & Ending

Let’s dive into the second most common reason students don’t pass — their writing lacks cohesiveness or completeness. In other words, they don’t have the 3-part combination including a beginning, middle, and end. They may have a beginning (or hook sentence), but after developing the middle, the piece just stops with a canned one-liner, like “The End” or “That’s all I know. Hope you liked my story,” or “Good-bye,” or “Thank you for reading this.”

If your writers are not habitually writing beginnings and endings for their middles, it’s time to make that a specific focus of instruction.

Teach the beginning & ending as one component, not two separate ones. Target beginnings and endings as a single unit. Offer students a structure for creating beginnings and endings. One idea is to encourage them to use the same type of beginning and ending. For example, if the writing begins with action, it can end with action. If it starts with a sound effect, it can end with a sound effect. If it begins with sensory description, then it can end with sensory description.

Describe this as the yo-yo effect. Releasing the yo-yo represents the beginning. The spinning at the bottom of the string represents the middle. And the yo-yo spiraling back up to the user’s hand represents the ending. However you start, you can end. However you send the yo-yo down, bring it back up the same way.

To help students get some practice with this concept I start by sharing an oral story about a bike crash I experienced:

I was riding my new bike faster and faster. Then, all of a sudden, my wheel hit a pothole and I went flying. End over end I somersaulted in the air. When I touched down again, I didn’t just crash. I slid. I skid. I skimmed across the road. When I came to a stop, my elbows and knees were bleeding. My hands hurt.

Consider the above to be the “middle” of a piece of writing. Use this same “middle” over and over, while orally reciting several different beginning/ending combinations. Some examples might include:

1. Intense Action

Beginning: I was pedaling fast down Hicker Hill on my brand new bike. My legs were going around and around. I remember picking up speed with every rotation.

Middle: Reference the crash.

Ending: It took a long time to hobble back up the hill, hauling my bike parts. There was a throbbing pain in my palms. They were scraped and raw, with speckles of gravel buried in them. Man, did they burn!

2. Sensory Description

Beginning: My new bike reflected the sunshine; it bounced off the shiny chrome trim. There was a white, plastic basket with seven, dainty purple flowers on the front. I swung my leg over it and began my first ride.

Middle: Reference the crash.

Ending: But, no matter how banged up I was, you should have seen my not-so-new bike. The chrome was dented. The paint was chipped. The basket was dangling from the handlebars, with only one purple flower remaining.

3. Intriguing Question

Beginning: Did you ever feel like you were flying? I have — the day I zoomed down Hicker Hill on my brand new bike.

Middle: Reference the crash.

Ending: Well, all I can say is you’ve seen a bird fly and crash into a window before, haven’t you?

4. Mood-Setting Emotion

Beginning: What a great day for bike riding! The sun was shining. The air was crisp. I was ready to hit the road, just me and my new bike.

Middle: Reference the crash.

Ending: It all went wrong, terribly wrong. All I want to do now is dump this bike in the garage and forget this day forever.

5. Sound Effect/Onomatopoeia

Beginning: WHIZ! The trees were behind me. WHIZ! I zoomed past a parked car. WHIZ! WHIZ! WHIZ! I passed mailboxes one by one. No one could catch me on my brand new bike.

Middle: Reference the crash.

Ending: CLINK! CLANK! CLUNK! The chain from my bike rhythmically banged against the bent fender, as I hauled my once-new bike back to the house.

The greatest advantage to such a technique is that students are immediately thinking of their ending before they even write the beginning. They know where their pieces are going. Producing a “meaningful whole” with a beginning, middle, and end is essential for on-demand writing.

This can be incorporated into primary-grade writing, too. This concept of tying the beginning and ending together is applicable even for young writers. Although it may not be a multi-sentence beginning with a multi-sentence ending, a single sentence is definitely doable.