This week’s Text begins another unit–a relatively long run of 16 posts, one on each Friday for the next 16 weeks.
Some years ago, while rifling through the book sections of Vermont thrift stores, I came upon a book by Robert M. Esch, Mary L. Wadell , and Roberta R. Walker called The Art of Styling Sentences: 20 Patterns for Success, Third Edition (Hauppage, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 1993)–and please (!) be forewarned that if you click on that hyperlink, it will take you to a page where a PDF of the book will automatically download to your computer I grabbed it for future reference. The future arrived much sooner than I expected, as the next year I was charged with teaching writing to a once-weekly institute class at the high school in which I served.
So I started developing a unit based on this book. Over time, however, I began to doubt the efficacy of this material and shelved it for future reference. When the pandemic hit, I took another look at the unit, which began life as eight lessons, and revised and expanded it with some new, more directly relevant material. The result was a new, sixteen-lesson unit for relatively advanced writers.
The primary problems, as I saw it, was that the source material for the unit was not quite as strong as it needed to be. Also, the “patterns” the book prescribes are often complex and use vocabulary, mostly terms of art in grammar, that I wish high school students possess (and think they ought to, but that’s a different bone of contention) but in my experience do not. Furthermore, these lessons probably would be better described as work in developing a rhetorical style rather than simply composing sentences.
In any event, now that I’ve subjected you to an elaborate rationale, this week’s Text is the planning materials for this unit. Without further ado, here is the unit plan, the lesson plan template, and the worksheet template. If you look at the each lesson, you’ll see that students are called upon to master the use of colons and semicolons, so here is a learning support on colons and semicolons. Finally here is a bibliographic guide to the best writers’ reference books on the market. I have long been interested in grammar and linguistics–actually, I hope this blog makes that self-evident–and have reviewed every book on the list and can, if I have any credibility, vouch for their quality and effectiveness.
That said, I want to single out one volume for special praise, Grant Barrett’s Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking (Berkeley: Zephyros Press, 2016). This is small paperback which plainly, therefore elegantly, explains points of grammar, punctuation, and style. It has become the one book I always go to for clarification or for deriving learning supports–of which there are many on this blog.
Stay tuned, please. There are 15 more posts in this series forthcoming.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Mark's Text Terminal 
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