Mastering Written English, 6th edition

The New Climate for Grammar Instruction

The edition of Mastering Written English immediately preceding this one appeared at a time of renascent interest in, and recognition of the importance of, grammar instruction in the teaching of writing. Since then the imposition of statewide writing standards and standardized tests has further heightened teachers’ interest in a new and more effective approach to grammar instruction, one that can measurably reduce error and even improve overall writing quality. This more effective approach has been variously dubbed a “pedagogical grammar,” a “writer’s grammar,” or a “usage grammar.” This “new” grammar can be described as follows:

· Eliminating vague, imprecise, and unreliable rules, the new grammar accurately identifies what good writers do when they write.

· It reduces the myriad categories of formal grammar to a minimum, and includes only those necessary for students to understand and to correct their most serious and frequent errors.

· It’s presented in clear, everyday language which students who are unacquainted with or confused by traditional grammatical terminology may readily grasp and apply.

· Its rules are operational, making clear how the written language works, so that students can use it not only in editing their writing for correctness, but also in improving it stylistically.

· Its mastery is facilitated first through practice that uses a range of approaches, like sentence-combining, focused proofreading, and varieties of sentence- and paragraph-transformations, and then through students’ editing their own writing for the rules they have just practiced.

The New Grammar and Mastering Written English

From its first edition, Mastering Written English has used most of the features of the new grammar:

· Our rules are operational ones, with minimal grammatical terminology, and limited to what students need to know to understand and avoid their characteristic mistakes.

· The distinction between the visual and the linguistic features of written English is integral to the organization and pedagogy of our work. In this edition, Module 1 deals with the purely visual features of the written code, and the other nine with its grammatical component.

· The features we stress the most are essentially 16 of the 20 errors in written English which the oft-cited Connors-Lunsford study (College Composition and Communication, 1988) identified as actually occurring most frequently in college writing. We also give close attention to those errors which Maxine Hairston’s ground-breaking study (College English, 1981) found most highly stigmatized.

· We provide extensive practice in increasingly complex contexts, using the full range of sentence and paragraph transformations.

Beyond the New Grammar

Mastering Written English offers important advantages over other textbooks using the new grammar:

· Mastering Written English is self-instructional. Except for the writing assignments in each module (discussed below), every single exercise, no matter how complex, has an unambiguous answer at the back of the book. Students may correct their own work, exercise by exercise, and then periodically apply what they have learned in the process to their own writing, using the rules and analytic tools they have mastered step by step. No other text provides such sophisticated exercises with unambiguously right and wrong answers.

· This self-teaching method enables students to move ahead at their own pace, spending as much or as little time necessary to master a particular rule. Moreover, in the process of correcting their own work, students learn four important lessons: (1) to notice fine details of the written code, (2) to read and follow instructions carefully, developing perceptual skills lacking in most students in basic and developmental writing, (3) to learn from their own mistakes, and (4) to identify their own specific weaknesses in the production of standard written English. At the same time teachers’ work-load is greatly reduced in that they have only to spot-check students’ work on the modules for accuracy. While keeping abreast of students’ progress in mastering the rules of written English and applying them to their own writing, teachers are freed up to teach aspects of writing which can only be communicated by a teacher, and through interaction with other writers and readers.

· Advocates of the new grammar have not yet come to focus on the critical importance of a thoroughly systematic and incremental approach in teaching grammatical structures to inexperienced writers. The order in which our chosen features are presented has been dictated by linguistic theory and experience. Just as each module builds logically and incrementally on what has gone before, so too each exercise is carefully ordered and crafted so as to call only on knowledge already mastered. Sensitive to the mindlessness of mere repetition, we have tried, even within exercises, to design each item so as to present a slight advance, a discernibly new challenge beyond the item that came before. Further, in this systematic approach, teachers at all times are aware of what students have learned and what they have yet to learn, and may mark errors accordingly. This helps students to recognize their responsibility for avoiding errors that they have learned to identify and correct.

· Advocates of the new grammar continue to rely almost completely on a purely cognitive or conceptual approach. But studies have shown that inattention to visual details in writing in combination with oral language habits (rather than ignorance of a rule) is the root of most errors in writing. We have tackled this problem through consciousness-raising exercises, making students aware of the kinds of errors they are apt to overlook, especially in certain semantic and phonetic contexts. These perceptual exercises begin in the introductory section To the Student, and continue throughout, as for example in Module 5 in regard to dropped plural S endings, and in Module 7 in regard to omitted ED inflections. As mentioned above, the self-teaching approach, enabling students to correct their own work, supports the development of this important writing and proofreading skill.

Innovations in This 6th Edition

1. The target population has been broadened:

In general, by including somewhat more advanced work, by de-emphasizing some of the more elementary material, by increasing the emphasis on sentence construction (the most persistent problem in the writing of so-called regular college composition students), and by providing more opportunities for students to apply what they learn in their own writing, this edition is now suitable for courses ranging from basic writing to those college composition courses which include less practiced writers. And because of the book’s self-instructional format, it can accommodate this range when it occurs within one class: it can be used by some students in the class, and not by others; some students can be assigned one set of modules, others a different set.

2. An entire new section trains students in the writing process:

We have added an entire new section on the writing process. Placed at the very beginning of the book, this section trains students in all the steps of the writing process, and helps them to experience the important differences between revising their ideas for greater effectiveness and editing their writing for correctness. Thus it prepares them for writing the papers they will be assigned as they move through the book (see item #3 below).

3. The transfer of editing skills to students’ own writing has been facilitated:

In this edition, students begin each module by choosing one of two topics and developing it into a paper of four or more paragraphs, practicing the planning, drafting, and revising steps in the writing process as they learned them in Section 1. The topics themselves and the special instructions that accompany them insure that students will use the targeted feature of the module repeatedly in their own freely composed writing. They will then edit their draft paper for this feature in systematic stages as they work through the module. At the end of the module, after they have finished editing for this module’s feature, they will edit their draft for features covered in prior modules, and then will prepare a final copy to hand in.

Because of the inclusion of the new Section 1 on the writing process, the instructions for these writing assignments have been made less detailed and less explicit than they were in the 5th edition, giving students more responsibility for the development and organization of their papers. These writing assignments therefore give students a chance not only to practice using the module feature in their own writing, but also to improve their composing skills and (beginning with Module 2) to practice the kinds of expository and argumentative writing required by many introductory college courses.

4. The sentence analysis modules have been reordered:

The simplified but powerful approach to sentence-analysis which was used in the previous edition and proven there to be effective, continues. But now students work on correcting sentence problems (fragments and run-ons) after their work on nouns and verbs. This change is likely to improve learning in both areas.

The new method of sentence analysis, central as it is to our new approach, calls for further explanation. It is based on the same linguistic premise as the successful sentence-combining pedagogy, namely, that all written sentences are composed of “kernel” (or “simple”) sentences connected by three kinds of “connecting” words (what we call joining, expansion, and noun-expansion words). Once students have learned to identify each verb (with a circle), its subject (with a box), and every connecting word (with a +), and once they have mastered the principle that between a capital letter and a period the number of simple sentences must always be one more than the number of connecting words, they hold the key to the structure of every conceivable sentence. The utter simplicity of the concept, along with its mode of dramatically clear marking, makes it instantly transferable to student writing. And they can apply it directly to their own writing, without their having to rewrite, diagram, or add any obtrusive clutter. Even before students do specific work on run-ons and fragments, they begin to recognize and correct these problems. For a fuller understanding of this syntax for writers, we invite you to take the short course offered in the Instructor’s Manual that accompanies this book.

5. Students are provided with information that will help them to perform successfully on various statewide tests of grammar and writing:

This edition now includes almost all of the topics covered in these tests. In Module 5 on nouns and pronouns, new topics include pronoun case, reflexive pronouns, advanced pronoun reference, and avoiding sexist language. In Module 12, new and more difficult aspects of expansion are presented. At this point in the term students, having mastered the overall framework of the sentence, can readily understand the function of any piece of expansion within that framework. These new aspects include problems with adjectives and adverbs, misplaced and dangling expansion, with special emphasis on present and past participial expansion, and using parallel parts.

In many modules, students are alerted to the terms that they might be asked about on these system-wide or state-wide tests. By relating the grammatical concepts of Mastering Written English (taught using a simplified writer’s grammar) to the technical terms of grammar taught traditionally, we prepare them to perform as well as (if not better than) other students on the identification and correction tasks that typically constitute such tests. We call these terms “school grammar,” and highlight them as we did in this paragraph.

6. The new design is more user-friendly:

An attractive new interior design highlights rules more incisively and uses a more conversational tone so that students absorb the material more readily and are less intimidated by what might be considered its technical nature.

Heightening Student Motivation and
Monitoring Their Progress

1. The goal of each exercise is highlighted so that students are motivated to do it purposefully.

2. Scoring grids are provided for each module and paper assignment. They keep students aware of the level of their control of the targeted feature in their own writing, their performance on the related exercises, and the probable connection between such control and such performance. They make it easy for teachers to check students’ satisfactory completion of modules and to score their writing assignments. Teachers may choose to grade the final writing assignment for overall quality as well as correctness, or to grade for correctness only, or use some other measure.

3. Rules Summary pages for students’ reference at the beginning of each module facilitate review and application of rules to their own writing.

View Prentice Hall’s publicity for Mastering Written English.