“Sentence composing provides acrobatic training in sentence dexterity…using literature as a writing school with a faculty of professional writers who virtually teach students to build better sentences.”
—Don and Jenny Killgallon
Getting Started with High School Sentence Composing introduces the powerful sentence-composing approach. Using real sentences by authors as models, it provides practice with five sentence parts, or tools, that research shows skilled writers use to create high-quality, variety-packed writing:
- Extenders to enlarge meaning within a sentence
- Identifiers to identify someone or something
- Describers to describe someone or something
- Elaborators to add details for full understanding
- Combos to combine tools within a sentence
Along the way, Don and Jenny Killgallon provide help for students, including:
- Basic sentence ideas—Activities to understand subjects, predicates, and their relationship to those five tools
- Broken sentences—Exercises to identify, avoid, and repair fragments
- Vocabulary scaffolds—“Quickshots” to include an immediate, clear definition in context for challenging words.
