Customer Reviews

Everyday Editing

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Jeff Anderson's book offers lots of practical ideas for tweaking your writer's workshop and making your students better writers. He devotes chapters to various skills and how to teach them (serial commas, appositives, participles, etc.). One of his basic tenets is selecting good examples of sentences from your own readings of YA books, then using them as teaching tools by asking kids what they notice (it might be how appositives are punctuated, or how the colon introduces a list). The sentences interest the kids because they are taken from high interest books, and instead of learning from BAD sentences that are riddled with mistakes for correction, students learn from models that are free of mistakes (novel thought -- "mentor" sentences instead of "mental" ones).

You can find plenty of sentences to use in your own readings, but if you don't have time, Anderson provides examples for you in this book. He also devises sentence combining activities by "deconstructing" good mentor sentences and asking students to put them together again (where's Humpty Dumpty when you need him?). Again, great idea. Studies have proven that sentence combining is an effective teaching tool.

I just used Anderson's idea for creating an Appositive Book with separate flaps for the subject, the appositive, and the verb parts of the sentences and my students loved it. By raising different flaps in the partitioned book, they were able to create some amusing (OK, silly) sentences using appositives. It's stuff like this that makes stuff like grammar (the Teflon of our teaching chores) stick!

Recommendation: Buy. Then use. Frequently.

I would pay triple for this book! It is one of the best teaching resources I own, and I promise you will use it over and over again.

Think of this: Does a coach repeatedly show his athletes how NOT to perform a play? Does he swing the bat incorrectly over and over before asking his players to show him a perfect swing? Of course not! So why do so many writing teachers (including me - before I knew better) do the same thing? Anderson believes that we cannot give our students "worksheets riddled with errors" and ask them to take out commas or to add in semicolons. Instead, we should teach editing like a sport. In this book, Anderson does just that. He invites students to notice well-written mentor texts before letting kids take a swing.

The first section of the book is Anderson's rationale (backed by research) for why kids should be taught editing skills. Part two contains actual lessons you can immediately use in your classroom - no matter what grade you teach. Each lesson is set up with a series of invitations. The first student invitation is to notice powerful writing - to truly look at master writers and learn why they used specific punctuation marks. Once the students truly understand the grammatical concept, Anderson invites them to imitate master writers by combining sentences, editing, and writing.

I don't consider myself to be the greatest teacher ever, but Anderson's book is helping me become much better. This book truly gets kids to want to learn and master grammatical concepts. His lessons are genius, creative, and down-right fun! Kids love them. The invitations are created so teachers can praise students for what they have done right, rather than nagging them for what they've done wrong. (If you were the student, wouldn't this praise make you feel better as a writer?)

As Anderson states in his first book Mechanically Inclined, we should "Teach grammar and mechanics as a creational facility rather than a correctional one." Anderson uses this same philosophy in Everyday Editing. You will find Anderson's books to be extremely valuable to both you and your students.

...for years to find a resource to help me teach punctuation and grammar successfully with all my students in the context of writing workshop. This is it! Not only has this book and the book "Mechanically Inclined" by the same author revolutionized the way I teach, but is spreading throughout our school because it is so successful. We're adapting Jeff Anderson's methods to be used at all levels. I've seen more understanding and application of conventions in the month or two that we've been teaching using his methods than we've ever seen in a full school year. Thanks to Jeff Anderson, our whole school is Sentence Stalking and the hallways are covered with mentor sentences we've harvested from books we've read.

I was fortunate enough to listen to a presentation by Jeff Anderson at NIU's literacy conference this year. He introduced us to his grammar instruction technique comprising using mentor sentences, encouraging imitation, and having kids find in their personal reading sentences that follow given patterns.

I started using this book instead of his other one, "Mechanically Inclined," because Mr. Anderson suggested that this book was more simple to start using. I have both books, and I agree with his assessment.

The first lesson I used was the one on the serial comma. We went through this one at the conference. I decided to add upon it by also using this lesson to introduce nouns. After a class discussion and some student imitations of the sentence, I had the students free-write for a bit, asking them to please use a list of nouns with serial commas somewhere in their writing. They were to highlight this list. If they could not fit it into their writing, they could just write a random sentence after their journal entry, using the parameters given.

Now, when we complete our daily-write in our journals, I have the kids write the "grammar ticket" (the grammar item I want them to include) at the top of the page and then highlight where they used it in their writing.

"Miss?"
"Yes, dear?"
"Are we ever gonna use our English books this year?"
"I suspect we'll use them occasionally. I want to try using this way more often, though."
"Oh my gosh, I'm so glad! This is fun! I like this. I didn't like our English books. This makes it SO much easier to learn!"

(other heads nod in agreement)

True conversation from my 5th grade class...

Really, if you can get a kid to say grammar instruction is fun, I think you've got it made! Thanks, Jeff! Great book :0)
"I'm

This is a great book for integrating grammar into the teaching of writing in a way that really works for kids. Buy it and use it! Fast delivery.

Anderson's entire approach to grammar teaching is through experiential learning. Here's his approach: invite students to observe a mentor text (sentence), invite students to talk about what they observe, invite students to imitate the author's writing craft using grammar conventions, invite students to analyze what they created from the imitation.

Students learn grammar through trying it, experiencing grammar's power not as a rule to remember but as tools to create meaning. I'm seeing the power of this approach with my English language learners who are native Chinese speakers.