Mastering Written Sentences: What It Is

Who Can Use This Book

Why This Book Works: Its Guiding Principles

1. English syntax is a system whose principles learners must grasp on some level before they can control the complex structures of written sentences in their own writing.
2. Only when learners have objectified their intuitions about the structure of written sentences, and have them clearly in their conscious lines of sight, can they move beyond them to write not only correct but also clearer and more effective sentences.
3. However, a thorough grasp of a few absolutely basic principles of sentence structure will serve the needs of novice writers far better than their attempts to learn most of the terms and concepts of traditional grammar.
4. Rules, even when fully mastered as such, will become operative only when reinforced by extensive practice.
5. To be effective, this practice must be systematic and incremental, and executed in contexts of ever-increasing difficulty.
6. Since meaning arises generally not from sentences in isolation, but from the relationships among them, and since focus on form is unrealistically easy when meaning is limited, it follows that sentences used for such practice should be contextualized within a framework of related meanings, and as often as possible be arranged in actual paragraph form.
7. If such practice, no matter how expertly devised, is to be ultimately effective, students must apply its principles step by step to their own writing, with some feedback from a teacher or tutor or from fellow students working in small groups.
8. Self-instruction, with some supervision and support, can be more effective in certain ways than whole-class instruction as a method of learning the basics of skills like sentence construction, governed as such skills are by invariant rules or by principles of limited variability.

How This Book Works: Its Distinctive Features

• A new and powerful approach to sentence analysis Relying on Principles 1, 2, and 3, we devote Part 1 (Understanding Sentences, Units 1-6) to teaching students basically one thing—how to analyze sentences and discover how they work. The book’s approach, introduced in the fifth edition of Mastering Written English, is based on the same linguistic premise as 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), or by transition words. Beginning with a reliable tense-test for identifying a verb (which they mark with a circle), and its subject (which they mark with a box), students go on to recognize and use every connecting word (which they mark with a +).

  From the beginning, students learn that any word or group of words that’s not a verb or its subject or a connecting word usually tells more about a verb or its subject or another word in the sentence, and this we call “expansion.” We generally ignore the complement, because it rarely creates problems. In the book’s system, then, four terms—verb, subject, connecting word, and expansion— replace a myriad of terms, with their many confusing distinctions useless to novice writers. The simplicity of the concept and method, along with its mode of dramatically clear marking, makes it instantly transferable to students’ own writing. They can apply it directly, without having to rewrite, diagram, or add any obtrusive clutter, in order to analyze, fix, and further revise all varieties of sentences.

  In Part 2 (Writing Correct Sentences, Units 7-10), students learn to find and fix sentence faults by applying the overarching principle, growing out of the initial premise, that between a capital letter and a period the number of simple sentences always should be one more than the number of connecting words. However, we have found that even before they do specific work on run-ons and fragments, they often begin to recognize and correct these problems because they have grasped, basically, how sentences work.

  Ultimately, this thorough understanding of how sentences work makes it possible for them to go on in Part 3 (Writing Better Sentences, Units 11-14) to write not only correct but also well-constructed, clear, and stylistically effective sentences.

• Extensive systematic, incremental, and contextualized practice The extensive practice demanded by Principle 4 bridges the gap between students’ grasp of the rule and their ability to apply it to their own writing. But this practice, even though extensive, can help writers effectively internalize the rule only if the exercises are structured and sequenced as indicated by Principles 5 and 6. Hence each exercise is built on what has gone before and prepares for what follows, and each sentence in each exercise is contextualized within a web of larger meaning, whether within a paragraph or as one of a series of separately numbered but related sentences. Pre-publication reviewers have noted that the content of these exercises is generally more interesting and informative than those in currently available sentence workbooks.

• Transfer of syntactic skills to students’ own writing Principle 7 is obvious and oft-repeated, but, as one pre-publication reviewer remarked, in all other sentence books the work on syntax and the work on composing are kept oddly distinct. In this book, however, at four key points, students write a paper on a topic that facilitates their use of the aspect of sentence construction that’s just been introduced. As they learn more about that feature, they apply what they are learning to their own sentences in that preliminary paper. Then, at the end of the relevant section, they write another paper to demonstrate their control of that aspect and of all previously taught aspects of syntax. Teachers need to read and respond only to the four papers that should demonstrate control of aspects of syntax.

  Transfer of skills from workbook exercises to students’ own writing is one thing teachers have always been most skeptical about. Teachers who have field-tested the fifth edition of Mastering Written English, which uses a similar approach, have found that students experience increasing control over the revision and editing of sentences as they work through a unit. Reviewers also have expressed confidence that this approach, coupled with the book’s powerful new sentence analysis system, will impact on students’ own writing.

• Self-instruction In accordance with Principle 8, all exercises, no matter how complex, have unambiguous answers at the back of the book. Students correct their own work, exercise by exercise, learning from their own mistakes, using the scoring charts on the cover pages of each unit to keep track of their progress, and periodically applying what they’ve taught themselves in order to revise and edit their own writing. The self-teaching approach is effective not only because it compels students’ attention by making them responsible for their own learning, but also because it’s combined with the book’s systematic, step-by-step approach.

  As has been stressed, since not all of the students in a particular class may need the work it provides, or some students may need only part of it, a supplementary workbook needs to be flexible. Perhaps more than any other feature, the book’s self-teaching approach makes this flexibility possible. Because students are working on their own, at their own pace, it’s easy for teachers to individualize assignments to accommodate specific needs. Teachers may assign the units for homework, just spot-checking them for accuracy, and marking only the four “test” essays. If the entire class is using the book, instructors will find it useful to structure work in small groups so that students can apply the approaches they’re all learning to revising sentences in each other’s papers. And in teaching the process approach to writing, instructors can have students apply the book’s methods at the revising and editing stages of that process.