“The words of the world want to make sentences and paragraphs." (Gaston Bachelard, writer and philosopher).
Would you expect a book on paragraphs to spend its first half on sentences? Well, that's what happens here – and for good purpose. By delving deep into sentence construction skills, students are led step-by-step into building fleshed-out sentences that eventually become the foundation for interesting paragraphs. As always in this series, model sentences and paragraphs from well-known authors are everywhere; many evocative in their own way and nudging the would-be writer into a would-be reader.
A series of sentence-building tools are introduced in this book: Opener (how sentences begin), the S-V Split (content inserted between subject and verb), the Closer (where you'd expect it to be – at the end of the sentence), and the Mix (using more than one option in a sentence). Effective authors are skilled at inserting meaningful content into basic sentences and you'll see countless examples. Another important aspect of sentence construction is boundaries or, in other words, avoiding fragments and run-ons and, again, the student is given opportunities to identify and fix problematic sentences.
Exercises practicing these skills prepare the student for the next step: combining sentences into effective paragraphs. The simplest structure for “best-paragraph" is suggested: “a topic, lots of comments about that same topic spread across many sentences, and especially sentence-composing tools like those used by authors." With the premise that effective paragraphs will typically have more content rather than less, students are introduced to several techniques for expanding and imitating paragraphs as well as exploring different forms of writing. Includes 63 activities. ~ Janice