The value of grammar instruction in improving students' writing has been debated for at least 150 years, and is showing no signs of tiring. But would teaching grammar actually improve writing? In fact, study after study has shown that the study of grammar does not translate to improved student writing. Indeed, the basic skills of writing are not…

A crucial concept in Francis Christensen's principles of writing involves the "addition," which may be construed as any grammatical unit that is not a main clause. Obviously the effect of rhetorical writing derives mainly from the number of additions as well as from their placement and function within the single sentence. By means of…

One of six related documents, making up a U.S. Air Force correspondence course, this publication deals with effective writing and emphasizes the sentence as the basic unit of written communication. Part one focuses on internal sentence punctuation and covers the use of the comma, semicolon, colon, period, capital, abbreviations, and numbers. Part…