Fourteen grammatical structures are developed as writing tools in an accessible, understandable, and similar manner through the sentence-composing approach. For each structure students will:
• learn a clear definition of its characteristics and function.
• practice it through five guided sentence-composing activities.
• deepen their understanding through an independent creative writing activity.
• vary the tools through multiplying and combining them.
Students and teachers will quickly discover how powerful the sentence-composing approach can be for learning grammar-and for raising students' writing abilities to new, exciting levels.
An online teacher's guide accompanies Grammar for High School and includes advice, tips, resources, answer keys, and even curricular plans for teachers who are either new to the Killgallon approach or sentence-composing veterans.
Although based on grammatical structures commonly taught in secondary English classes, the sentence-composing approach differs greatly from traditional teaching of grammar. The activities in grammar books—naming of sentence parts and parsing of sentences—dissect dead sentences.
For all your rhetorician's rules Teach nothing but to name his tools. —Samuel Butler,
Hudibras
