Customer Reviews

The Least You Should Know About English: Writing Skills (Form B)

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I love this series -- it's straightforward and easy to teach in portions rather than having to go sequentially through the book as you do with other workbooks. However, I was ding-dong enough to buy all three forms -- A, B, and C. If you read the footnotes at the beginning of B and C, you'll note the instructions/content/topics are the same in all three Forms -- the only thing that changes are the exercises. For my purposes in a high school English classroom, only one Form would have been fine since I could have created my own additional exercises as needed.

The information covers basic parts of speech through essay writing and includes remedial through advanced types of exercises and topics. I particularly like the possessives and contractions as well as the doubling-before-suffix lessons. I can't say the information is rare, but it's nice to have it all in one handy reference that's genuinely full of practical instruction and lacks unnecessary narrative.

This book covers all the grammar you need to write clearly and professionally. It does not dwell on pedantic technicalities.

The idea is to present the facts in context of how you may use them, in a way that makes it easy to learn and remember.

Pithy: having substance and point, tersely cogent

This book was recommended by my ENG 101 Instructor and is great for everyday reference.

I use this book with adults I teach in prison. It's terrific. Not cheap, alas, but terrific.

When I was teaching high school, I was frequently appalled by my students' pathetic accquaintance with English grammar. When an early edition of this book arrived at our English Department, I immediately gravitated to it, making sure that a book order was placed for my classes. That edition became my bible, especially the exercises on subject/verb agreement, clear pronoun references, etc.

My students did the exercises, but I turned them into contests, like a spelling bee, where a student correctly running through five or more sentences, would receive an extra quiz grade or a makeup grade for a homework not turned in. (However, in this situation I excluded assigned essays.) Students became motivated to master the rules and even rooted for students who needed another opportunity to get that extra quiz grade. Rote recitation does work when a teacher can make it fun and dangle a clear reward.

Writing clear and precise English does depend on a reasonable understanding of its grammar. All the writing courses in the world will be to no avail unless certain basic rules are understood, and I was delighted to see that this book is still making a contribution. I can only wonder why students by the time they arrive in high school, do not know some of the basic components of their language. This latest edition includes exercises on parts of speech so this omission in their education continues. What is happening in elementary and middle school English classes?