Sentence Composing for High School: A Worktext on Sentence Variety and Maturity

by Don Killgallon

With the original publication of his sentence composing series, Don Killgallon changed the way thousands of high school English teachers and their students look at language, literature, and writing by focusing on the sentence. In this expanded series, Killgallon presents the same proven methodology but offers all-new writing exercises for middle school, high school, and college students. Unlike traditional grammar books that emphasize sentence analysis, these worktexts asks students to imitate the sentence styles of professional writers, making the sentence composing process enjoyable and challenging. Killgallon teaches subliminally, nontechnicallythe ways real writers compose their sentences, the ways students subsequently intuit within their own writing. Designed to produce sentence maturity and variety, the worktexts offer extensive practice in four sentence-manipulating sentence unscrambling, sentence imitating, sentence combining, and sentence expanding. It's demonstrably true that Sentence Composing can work anywhere--in any school, with any student.

Genres: Teaching, Education, Writing, Academic, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published March 19, 1998

Reviews

[Nic Poe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered this book as a student-teacher at a high school where over 95% of students passed their high school state writing exams. The teacher who mentored me based a great deal of her teaching on this book, which is why she recommended it to me. Five years later, after reading countless other books and attending several professional development seminars, I am finding this book to be the clear favorite. It may not be as easy to incorporate as some might like, but the fact of the matter is that students truly need to develop these skills and there are no shortcuts.

[CR Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this text could have been so much more clearly presented. I will be modifying to use in the classroom for next year, but this year? I'm drowning. Some things have to give.