If I had my druthers, I would teach five sections of rhetoric and composition every day until I retired. Readers of this blog, I am confident, understand that good writing instruction particularly interests me. Unfortunately, in 19 years of teaching, while I have seen plenty of writing assigned, I have never seen it explicitly taught. This has been, frankly, a source of a lot of bitter frustration for me. I do what I can, but it usually isn’t long before a functionally illiterate administrator shuts me down. The credo in the New York City Department of Education seems to be that if students haven’t learned diction, grammar, usage, and style by high school, they never will. How that squares with the amount of writing we nonetheless assign–which is often quite a bit–I have yet to determine.
Unfortunately, I am a special education teacher who must (as I have, again, frankly, needed to learn the hard way over and over) go along to get along. In my experience in the schools in which I have served, no one is particularly interested in anything I might have to say about teaching and learning.
Which doesn’t mean I can’t work at things anyway–that was really what drove the inception of this blog.
During the 2024-2025 school year, when I had a spare moment, I worked on a unit, Introduction to Writing Sentences, that I started during the pandemic. Now that unit is complete; the next 18 Weekly Texts will bring the whole thing to you.
If you’re a regular user of this blog, nota bene, please that some of these materials are parts of other units that I have very likely previously published. What I can tell you, I’d like to think, is that I improved many of the lessons per se, then thought long and hard, then worked long and hard, to get them into some kind of sequence. The material in this unit is more heavily supported, and includes some new learning supports.
This week’s Text, then, is everything out of the planning materials folder for this unit. Without further ado, then, here is the unit plan, the lesson plan template, and the worksheet template. This bibliography of writer’s manuals is probably something students, particularly college-bound students, ought to have. Likewise this lexicon of basic grammatical terms excerpted from from a classic, William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style (New York: Longman, 2000).
This learning support on using colons and semicolons is a general handout, like the lexicon above, to support students throughout this unit. So is this learning support on dependent and independent clauses. I’m not sure why it was in the planning materials folder for this unit, but here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the parts of speech (three sentences of text, which may require a bit of editing or adaptation for struggling readers, and three comprehension questions) that I assume I planned to use downstream on this unit.
Finally, if you need it, here is a lesson checklist that I use for a variety of purposes, including quality control and improvement over this body of work.
And that, esteemed reader, is the contents of the planning materials folder for the Introduction to Writing Sentences Unit. Now, for the next 17 weeks, Mark’s Text Terminal will offer all 17 lessons for your use.
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 