The purpose of Paragraphs for High School: A Sentence-Composing Approach is threefold:
• to teach students that good writing often results from the addition of sentence parts to sentences, and sentences to paragraphs.
• to provide students varied activities via authors' sentences and paragraphs demonstrating and practicing the power of those additions.
• to challenge students to include similar additions in their own sentences and paragraphs.
Like a building rising brick by brick, paragraphs unfold one sentence at a time. The quality of sentences largely determines the quality of paragraphs. The focus of this worktext is to help students build better sentences, and through them, better paragraphs, by imitating model sentences and paragraphs by authors.
An approach developed over thirty years by co-author Don Killgallon, sentence composing is a unique, eminently teachable rhetoric of the sentence. Its distinguishing feature is the linking of the three strands of the English curriculum - grammar, composition, and literature - through exclusive use of literary model sentences and paragraphs for students to manipulate and imitate.
