With tips on punctuation, style, grammar and essay structure, this handy guide provides succinct and practical guidance on students most common areas of concern in their written work. Each tip is supplemented by authentic examples of student writing, suggested re-writes, and appropriate self-help exercises. This book contains four parts. Part I:…

This article presents the results of an action research study whose purpose was to apply alternatives for the development of grammatical competence in a group of third semester students of a Morphosyntax I course in an English language teaching undergraduate program at a Colombian public university. Given the fact that the teaching of grammar has…

This paper draws upon data from a research project, undertaken in 2 Year 6 classrooms during the 2006 World Cup, to analyse how children used complex sentence structures in their writing on a football web-log. We explore how the confluence of a temporary, popular, global event and an online forum for communication created a moment of linguistic…

Once students can identify main (independent) clauses and main ideas, a simple graphic system will demonstrate whether their sentences are strong and unified. The student underlines the main clause of a sentence and circles the main idea. In a strong, unified sentence, the circle will sit on the line. If the circle does not sit on the line, the…

Examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s (the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining) and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. Concludes that this erasure of sentence…

Noting that grammar is alive, changing, and controversial, this book offers a combination of guidelines and creative language use for people who have already been exposed to the rules of grammar to help them start building their own style of speaking and writing. The first part of the book "Recalling the Parts of Speech," provides a…

Most students today have been reared on television and have had only slight brushes with the parts of grammar. Nevertheless, a variety of sentence pattern exercises and sentence combining lessons based on the students' own writing can be used to augment, challenge and improve students' writing skills and vocabulary. In the first exercise, students…

Precise and effective writing can be taught and learned; a knowledge of grammar makes it easier both for the student and teacher. (Editor)

Designed for students who have grammatical problems, the syntactic approach presented in this paper helps explain the process of revision, and should be used only after a student has written a draft. The paper suggests that the students' hypothetical objective can be to understand how every word in any sentence is syntactically connected to the…

The word "grammar" can be defined in at least four different ways: "intuitive grammar," our intuitive sense of sentence structure; "effective grammar," a command of the syntactic resources of the language; "'good' grammar," the use of socially prestigious grammar; and "formal grammar," the systematic study of the structure of the language. Formal…

This book is designed to help individuals prepare for the Writing Skills Test, which is the first of five tests that make up the General Educational Development (GED) Test battery. The introduction offers a detailed description of the content, format, and scoring of the GED test, focusing on the Writing Skills Test, and a descriptive outline of…

The experimental evidence on the value of a sentence-combining approach to improving reading comprehension is still sparse, but the possibilities seem rich.

A practicum provided 10th- grade students in 2 English honors classes with direct instruction in sentence combining. The goal of the program was to increase the syntactic complexity of student writing, to have students express more in each sentence. Instruction was approached from different aspects. The students worked with two textbooks on…

Special issue devoted to teaching Level II French. (DS)