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

by Don Killgallon

With the first edition of his book, 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 revised edition, Killgallon presents the same proven methodology but offers all-new writing exercises designed specifically for the middle school student. Unlike traditional grammar books that emphasize the parsing of sentences, this worktext asks students to imitate the sentence styles of professional writers, making the sentence composition process an enjoyable and challenging one. Killgallon teaches subliminally, nontechnically--the ways real writers compose their sentences, the ways students subsequently intuit within their own writing. Designed to produce sentence maturity and variety, the worktext offers extensive practice in four sentence-manipulating sentence unscrambling, sentence imitating, sentence combining, and sentence expanding. All of the activities are based on model sentences written by widely respected authors. They are designed to teach students structures they should but seldom use. The rationale is that imitation and practice are as valuable in gaining competence and confidence in written language production as they are in oral language production. Since the practices have proven successful for the great majority of students who have used them in all kinds of schools, it's demonstrably true that Sentence Composing can work anywhere--in any school, with any student.

Genres: Education

136 pages, Paperback

First published October 21, 1997

Reviews

[Jennie]

I learned that I don't have to seek out all of my own mentor texts; someone has done some of the legwork for me.

[Kristin Tabb]

A well-scaffolded approach to teaching middle schoolers various sentence composition techniques using advanced grammar, and by imitating sentences from excellent classic and popular literature many students would be familiar with. Students work to identify, analyze, synthesize, and then finally construct, sentence types common in good literature. Excellent content, drier presentation and a cover too dated for middle school. See the updated “Middle School Grammar: A Sentence Composing Approach” and some of the other updated Heinemann workbooks (which, sadly, still have lame covers. The content makes up for it, though!)

[North Landesman]

Fascinating workbook attempting to help students write better.