Co-ordination and ellipsis

Co-ordination and ellipsis
Don't take little words for granted. A case in point is the conjunction and. At KS2 it helps to make sentences longer, but at KS3 it helps to make them shorter again. Very young writers are doing well to write two sentences:

We have a hamster.

We want a goldfish.

After a year or two they're combining the two ideas into a single compound sentence:

We have a hamster and we want a goldfish.

This pattern is called co-ordination, which means that the clauses are equal; for example, you can put them in either order:

We want a goldfish and we have a hamster.
But even when co-ordination is in place it still deserves attention because it allows a special kind of ellipsis - in plain English, 'leaving words out'. If the beginning of the second clause is the same as the beginning of the first, we can (and usually should) omit it:

We have a hamster and

we want a goldfish.

In this case the ellipsis consists of just one part of the clause (its subject), but it can be much bigger:

We often have to clean the hamster and

we often have to change the goldfish water.
In general KS3 writers handle complex ellipsis like old hands

.

But beware. Co-ordination can combine more than two clauses, and when this happens ellipsis can fall to pieces as in this KS3 sentence:

"From the outside her house looks empty, old and needs painting."
The problem is that looks belongs to the second clause but not the third:

From the outside her house looks empty,

from the outside her house looks old and

from the outside her house looks needs painting.
Multiple ellipsis takes grammatical know-how and is well worth exploring in class.
Activity
You might start by asking pupils why this KS3 sentence feels a bit awkward. Then ask them to find ways of rewriting the sentence so that it isn’t clumsy. Ask them to think of other ‘awkward’ examples and annotate them to show what the problem is.
The activity helps pupils to see how important sentence structure can be in expressing ideas clearly.