Getting Started with High School Sentence Composing: A Student Worktext

"Sentence composing provides acrobatic training in sentence dexterity...using literature as a writing school with a faculty of professional writers who virtually teach students to build better sentences."

--Don and Jenny Killgallon

Getting Started with High School Sentence Composing introduces the powerful sentence-composing approach. Using real sentences by authors as models, it provides practice with five sentence parts, or tools, that research shows skilled writers use to create high-quality, variety-packed writing:

• Extenders to enlarge meaning within a sentence
• Identifiers to identify someone or something
• Describers to describe someone or something
• Elaborators to add details for full understanding
• Combos to combine tools within a sentence

Along the way, Don and Jenny Killgallon provide help for students, including:

• Basic sentence ideas--Activities to understand subjects, predicates, and their relationship to those five tools
• Broken sentences--Exercises to identify, avoid, and repair fragments
• Vocabulary scaffolds--"Quickshots" to include an immediate, clear definition in context for challenging words.