What it is. Wordiness is words that occupy space without adding meaning.
Why our test works. Length feels like effort to a child, so cutting feels like losing marks. The test reframes it: each word must justify its place, and the ones that cannot are the ones making the writing harder to read. It is also the most immediately visible improvement in the whole course — a paragraph cut by a third reads better and the child can see it, which buys their agreement for everything else.
Leans on. Grade 5 replaced weak verbs. This removes whole phrases.
Watch for. Do not let cutting become clipping. The test is whether MEANING survives, not whether the sentence got shorter.
Read and use Wordiness from Essay Voyage, pp.95–100. The worked example is the one you build on the board: Teacher reads the key passage of Wordiness aloud with the book open and models the move it The class reads Writing Book 6, p.61 — our own page, so a child who was absent can still get the lesson.
You open by saying where this sits — what it follows and what it is part of — in one sentence, and then you give them the reason it matters, in your own words, for about ten seconds.
Then you do one yourself, building it on the board and leaving it up: Teacher reads the key passage of Wordiness aloud with the book open and models the move it teaches on one sentence. The board copy is what they look back at when they stall, so it stays there for the whole lesson.
The We-do is the main whiteboard moment of the lesson — short answers, boards up on your signal, every child visible at once. Class applies the move from Wordiness to two sentences together, checking against the book's own example. If the answer is a whole sentence rather than a word, take it on their notebooks instead, because a sentence written on a whiteboard is written once and destroyed.
They open Writing Book 6 to page 61 and read it with you. Stop at the worked example and let them look at it.
Exit directions in full, standing still, before anyone moves. Then they work alone: In your notebook: apply Wordiness to three sentences of your own, double-spaced.
You close on the exit direction — Read out one sentence that uses Wordiness. — taken from every child before anyone stands, and then the line you want them to still have tomorrow: Delete a word. If the meaning survives, leave it deleted.
Do not let cutting become clipping. The test is whether MEANING survives, not whether the sentence got shorter.