If so, you can help your students write more engaging and elaborate pieces by teaching the following strategies for elaboration.
It is easy for any writer to mention a place without really telling the reader much about it. Encourage your students to . There may be a personal narrative or story that he was writing when he got so enthusiastic about the plot that he quickly mentioned some place that he did not describe with detail. Have your student go back and . It might be where the story takes place like a forest or a school. It might be a place where the main character dreams of going, like camping or skiing. Regardless, explain to your student that and helps the reader picture himself in that place. Make sure your students know that it is okay to return to a prior piece of writing to add that kind of detail. Describing a place helps the reader put himself in the story with greater ease, and it makes the characters and event more real.
Look at the following examples:
• In each sentence, the speaker is going to the mailbox, but the images are quite different. With the first sentence, the reader does not get a clear picture in her mind. She does not know how the person felt or how his body was moving. Each of the other examples gives the reader a more complete picture of how the person felt and acted. Show your students these examples and ask them which one they think is boring writing. They will say that the first is boring. Then ask them how they would describe the writing in the other sentences. They will probably say it is interesting, specific or good. Ask your students if they would rather write boring or interesting pieces. They will say they would rather write interesting ones. Then encourage them that and does not have boring writing. When you are talking about using specific words, it is a good time to . Show them that by looking up one word like happy, they can find many other ways to express that to paint a clearer picture: content, , etc. The more specific the word that she uses, the clearer the picture becomes in the reader’s mind. Divide your class into pairs or small groups and have them share a piece that they have written with their partners. Then ask their groups to point out places where they do not get a clear picture from what is written. Give students time to revise their pieces and then share with their groups again.
Showing not telling is the key to writing with elaboration. Place a simple common object in front of your class, like an apple, and ask them to describe it. After they have given some description, ask them to describe how the apple feels. Then ask them to describe how it smells. Ask how they think it tastes. of the apple for each category. Show your students by focusing on one of the senses at a time, they can provide a much more detailed and therefore interesting description. Give your students a little practice in class by asking them to . They should write their descriptions down on a piece of paper. When finished, have students exchange papers and try to guess what the other person’s object might be. Were they right? Did the writer give detailed description for each of the five senses?
A is a phrase that or .
• He is .
• The girl is .
Both of these phrases compare a person to another object.
A , on the other hand, .
• They boy was an excited puppy running around the room.
• The girl was a spinning top unable to stay still.
Inspire your students’ creativity by challenging them to . You may also want to have them describe each other (though only do this if you are sure no one will be offended). Tell them that using similes and metaphors in their writing helps the reader associate the written piece with something that they already know. This association makes the written piece more real and engaging for that reader.
If you have taught your students , they will be well prepared for this elaboration strategy. Using a person’s exact words is usually more interesting than a paraphrase in writing. Encourage your students to when writing their personal narratives. If your students are writing fiction, ask them to imagine what they would say in the situation about which they are writing. Then have them use those exact words for their stories. You can find more information on teaching about quotations here on busyteacher.org in the ESL essentials section.
This elaboration strategy ties into using specific vocabulary (strategy #2). With a focus on movement, encourage your students to . Instead of saying, “ ,” say, “ ” Instead of saying, “ ” say “ ” Using specific verbs rather than a verb plus adverb combination paints a better picture for your reader and helps the author show rather than tell in his or her writing. Let your students know that this is a strategy that professional writers use to make their writing more descriptive. To practice, have your students take a piece of their writing and circle all of the adverbs. Then have them replace the verb plus adverb combination with a more specific verb. How many of the adverbs were they able to replace?
, the professional writer’s motto, applies to more than just good verb usage. It is the cornerstone to good writing. A strong writer will communicate his character’s feelings through her actions. Instead of writing, “ ,” encourage your students to show those feelings to their readers by writing about the character’s actions.
This activity may be challenging to your students, but the final product is worth the effort it took to create it. They say that actions speak louder than words, and when it comes to descriptive writing, it is true.
You can teach them to your students one at a time or take a day and go through all of them. Either way, the more your students learn about elaboration in writing, the better writers they will become.
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Definition of elaborate (Entry 2 of 2)
intransitive verb
transitive verb
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'elaborate.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Adjective and Verb
Latin elaboratus , from past participle of elaborare to work out, acquire by labor, from e- + laborare to work — more at laboratory
1592, in the meaning defined at sense 1
1611, in the meaning defined at transitive sense 2
El'brus
“Elaborate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/elaborate. Accessed 6 Sep. 2024.
Kids definition of elaborate.
Kids Definition of elaborate (Entry 2 of 2)
Medical definition of elaborate, more from merriam-webster on elaborate.
Nglish: Translation of elaborate for Spanish Speakers
Britannica English: Translation of elaborate for Arabic Speakers
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Definition of elaboration noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
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Success is subjective and varies, including financial gain, fulfillment, impact, or work-life balance.
In interviews , defining success shows your values and how you align with the company’s goals.
Prepare by reflecting on achievements, understanding company values, and aligning your goals with theirs.
Avoid sharing overly personal details or using someone else's definition of success.
Evaluate past successes, align with the company’s mission, and personalize your career success vision.
When you're in a job interview , the interviewer might ask, "How do you measure success?" or "What does success mean to you?"
These are open-ended questions with no right or wrong answers. They allow you to show qualities employers value, like determination, motivation, drive, enthusiasm, and a team-focused mindset.
So, in this guide, we’ll discuss how to give a strong answer to these questions, along with examples of good responses.
It might seem obvious, but it’s hard to answer this question without considering what success means to you personally.
For some, success is about making money . For others, it’s about being happy. While your idea of success may differ, one way to consider this question is by focusing on a positive outcome. This could relate to a work project, a goal, or a task.
To determine success, consider the outcomes you want in your work. Here are some examples:
Feeling fulfilled
Doing meaningful work
Having a purpose
Being valued and appreciated
Being recognized for your contributions
Continually growing
Making an impact at work, in your community, or with your team
Maintaining good health
Achieving financial stability
Balancing work and life
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What success means to you definition in an interview can reveal a lot about your values, work ethic, and personality. It shows what drives you to excel and what motivates you. Interviewers might also ask this question to see if your values align with theirs and if you share a similar vision.
These open-ended questions help interviewers understand if you’re the kind of employee who sets and meets goals. Think of it this way: if you take the personal part out of this question, success simply means something that turns out well. That’s what the interviewer is asking to know if you can achieve good results. If you can communicate that to a hiring manager, you’ll make a strong impression.
Defining success can be tricky because it's personal and changes over time. There's no single answer for what makes someone successful, and your idea of success will always be unique.
This is normal, but you'll need to focus on defining success in a work context for a job interview .
To prepare, shortlist your recent achievements or times when you accomplished something important. Think about your goals, milestones, and moments when you positively impacted others. Here are some examples:
Did you meet a sales target?
Did you start a new employee resource group after it was a company goal for months?
Did you begin saying "no" to clients, allowing you to focus on launching a new product for your company?
Did you try something new at work? If it didn't work out, did you learn something valuable for the future?
It's helpful to know what not to say when answering this question. Here are some common mistakes to avoid:
Don't share overly personal information about your family or yourself.
Don't discuss your political or religious beliefs.
Don't forget to keep your answer professional.
Don't use someone else's definition of success.
Don't make your response sound robotic. Remember, they want to hire a real person, not someone perfect!
Defining success is personal and can vary greatly from one person to another. It's easy to get caught up in how others measure success, but it's important to focus on what it means to you both as an individual and an employee.
To help you craft your answer for a job interview , here’s a three-step method that can guide you in defining and communicating what success looks like to you:
Before discussing future success, reflect on your past achievements. Consider the successes (and failures) you've experienced, your strengths (and weaknesses), and your long-term goals. This reflection will help you identify patterns in your past successes that can inform your definition of future success.
Take a moment to think about your past wins. What challenges did you overcome to achieve them? What did you learn about yourself in the process? By understanding your past accomplishments, you can articulate how you plan to succeed in your future role.
Example Answer:
"Success, to me, is about learning and growing in a role. In my last position as [JOB TITLE], I accepted a challenging project that required a significant learning curve. I learned new skills while completing [PROJECT] and achieving [RESULT]. Success, to me, is about continuous improvement and being open to learning."
Specific Examples of Achievements to Consider:
Organized schedules or logistics for the executive team
Collaborated with other departments
Improved or reorganized processes
Onboarded and trained new team members
Solved problems or implemented new ideas
Increased revenue, sales, or customer retention
Managed budgets or saved the company money
Contributed to good customer service or operational efficiency
When interviewers ask about your definition of success, they often look to see if your values align with the company's culture and mission. They want to know if you’re a good fit for the organization.
Before answering, research the company’s mission statement, core values, and culture. Make sure your goals align with what the company prioritizes. Whether the focus is collaboration, innovation, or revenue growth, tailor your answer to reflect the company’s values.
"I know that [COMPANY] places a strong emphasis on [VALUES]. For me, success means working collaboratively with a team to create impactful solutions while upholding these core values. I believe aligning with [COMPANY]'s mission is key to achieving meaningful success."
This is where you can personalize your answer. Think about what success looks like for you in the short term and long term. Consider how your past experiences and the company’s values align with your career goals.
Success can mean achieving specific workplace goals, stepping out of your comfort zone, or growing into a leadership role . It can also mean learning from past failures and using those lessons to improve.
"I define success as the combination of [COMPANY VALUE] and determination to achieve a goal. I feel a project has been successful when I see real growth in my skills and abilities. At [COMPANY], I would consider my first success to be joining the team. From there, I would build on that success by taking advantage of learning opportunities and collaborating with the talented individuals here."
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When asked "What does success mean to you," it's important to define it in a way that reflects your own values and goals. Whether in a job interview or in life, understanding what success means to you can guide your decisions and keep you focused on what truly matters. Remember, your definition of success is personal, so keep it simple, authentic, and aligned with your own aspirations.
Success means reaching goals that bring personal and professional satisfaction while enjoying the journey and making a positive impact on others.
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People in this story.
Sari Altschuler
At first glance, the study of literature and the medical field don’t seem to have much, if anything, in common. But their intersection has a surprisingly rich history. “There used to be poetry in medical texts,” says Sari Altschuler, an associate professor of English at Northeastern University. “And if you talk to doctors, many of them want to be writers. That tradition is hundreds and hundreds of years old.” She found herself thinking about that tradition in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly how people were turning to literature to grapple with pain — a collective pain that was both highly visible in the protests after George Floyd’s killing and obscured behind closed doors in hospitals and isolated households. “There was a lot of reading [works like] Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ or ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ … these books that were supposed to provide some way of making sense of what was happening,” she says.
Others in her academic community were thinking about it, too. Thomas Constantinesco, a literature professor now at the Sorbonne, was at work on the book “Writing Pain in the 19th Century,” when the pandemic hit. Just before, with grant money from the Marie Curie foundation, he and Altschuler had put together a symposium calling for papers examining the intersection of pain and writing. “The essays were so great,” Altschuler says. “We thought, we should really try to pitch them somewhere.”
Read more on Northeastern Global News.
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COMMENTS
Learn what elaboration means in an essay and how to do it with different techniques and strategies. Find examples, tips, and elaboration stems to spark your writing.
can apply to your writing: Explain: simply expand on your established point in. ear, straightforward terms. Illustrate: provide a specific example that. ws your idea in practice. Describe Literally: write about the subject's qualities/e. ile, personification, etc.) Narrate: relate a personal.
Elaboration is the process of presenting and developing an idea by adding more detail to explain it. Learn how to teach elaboration in writing with activities, questions, charts and strategies for informational and opinion genres.
For expanding a paragraph, there are three overarching strategies: elaborating, extending and enhancing (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Each can be linguistically explained, and deserves a separate post. This post will focus on the first "E": elaborating. Elaboration refers to how a meaning construed in one sentence makes that in the ...
It's been helpful to introduce different strategies and spiral back as needed. Elaboration Strategies: Asking questions. Students can ask where, how, what kind, and why to add more details. While the added details (and specific questions) may look different in a narrative vs. an informational writing piece, the strategy works either way.
Elaboration is the process of explaining a sentence with further details. The addition of details to the given information helps to enhance clarity and make your writing impactful. Elaborating a sentence depends on the purpose and the need of the audience. Generally, sentences can be elaborated using real-life experiences, definitions, examples ...
The elaboration of narrative essays also requires description of actions, physical states or internal states. With actions, the writer might tend to focus on breaking down a pivotal moment into logical and organized replays. With physical states, the writer might elaborate on what things in the story sound like, smell like, taste like and feel ...
Harvard College Writing Center 3 Similarly, if you're asked to compare sources or consider sources in relation to each other, it is not enough to offer a list of similarities and differences.
Learn how to analyze and elaborate on your points in academic writing by asking probing questions. See an example of how to use probing questions to interpret a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "May Day".
Basically, elaboration means provding more specific details. So, if you have been asked to use more elaboration in your writing, you need to explain everything you have covered in your writing in greater detail. This will make your writing stronger and more impactful. Answered by Editage Insights 24 Oct, 2017. Resources for authors and journals.
Annotate. As a class, re-read the text, looking specifically for evidence that would support a claim. Have students annotate or highlight lines that would work to support the topic sentence and claim. Try working through this together as a class to begin. Then, ask them to do the same thing for a different chunk of the text in small groups.
Elaboration: Anatomy of an Essay. Eula Biss, Joan DIdion, and Robert Graves. Robert Graves fought in the trenches of the First World War, after which he wrote a memoir called Goodbye to All That in 1929. Later, Joan Didion wrote an essay called "Goodbye to All That" about her experiences as a young woman working at Vogue in New York ...
In essay writing, this means the author finds enough information to support a thesis, and also finding information that is credible and accurate. Sufficiency, however, is not enough. ... Information is the key to developing support and elaboration in the expository (essay) genres — informational, critical, and argumentative writing. While ...
Expert Answers. In the composition of essays, narratives, analyses, dissertations, etc., support and elaboration are essential in order to develop the main points of the work. Without elaboration ...
One of the best ways to teach elaboration in writing is through modeling. By walking students through the process, teachers can show them how to add details and expand their thoughts. Using examples from mentor texts or personal writing helps students see how professionals elaborate in their work. This strategy gives students a clear ...
Elaboration means "adding details." Kids are famous for answering "good" when asked how school was and "nothing" when asked what they did there. If pressed for elaboration, they might talk about recess, lunch, and even what they learned.
Here is how elaboration will be different for each type of writing. Narrative Essay - Students tell a story and elaborate with details by describing a specific moment. The goal is to help readers picture the scene and feel like they're in the story. Informational or Expository Essay- Students teach the reader about a topic in this type of ...
Step 2: Write your initial answer. After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process. The internet has had more of a positive than a negative effect on education.
Make a claim. Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim. Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim) Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives. The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays.
ENTATIVE PERFORMANCE TASK FULL WRITESFor argumentative writing, elaboration is the process of providing supporting details to explain, analyze, i. lustrate, or develop key information. In the lower grades (opinion writing), writers elabo. ate on reasons that support opinions. However in grades 6 and up (argumentative writing), writers integrate ...
Elaboration: 7 Writing Strategies. 1. Describe a Place in Detail. It is easy for any writer to mention a place without really telling the reader much about it. Encourage your students to go back through a piece they have written and look for a mention of a place. There may be a personal narrative or story that he was writing when he got so ...
The meaning of ELABORATE is planned or carried out with great care. How to use elaborate in a sentence.
Definition of elaboration noun in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more.
Oaths have their sinister uses. They can turn into weapons to coerce and restrict. The solemn oath, of course, is not a bad way to lie. The Mafia enforces silence with an oath, and the blood oath ...
When asked "What does success mean to you," it's important to define it in a way that reflects your own values and goals. Whether in a job interview or in life, understanding what success means to you can guide your decisions and keep you focused on what truly matters. Remember, your definition of success is personal, so keep it simple ...
What does "pain" mean, medically? From Wharton to Ellison and Hayes, literature has answers. People in this story. Sari Altschuler. At first glance, the study of literature and the medical field don't seem to have much, if anything, in common. But their intersection has a surprisingly rich history. ... "The essays were so great ...