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Mastering the
Paragraph: Editing Principles for
Writers
 The course price, $349, includes two 90-minute videotapes plus a
package of 10 student workbooks. Extra student workbooks are $12.50
each.
Course
Description
This video course helps students improve their knowledge of Standard
Written English. The course focuses on the paragraph, the building
block of an effective written composition. Students learn writing
skills as they edit interesting paragraphs and then receive immediate
feedback on their performance.
Sample
Passage
Students are presented with a paragraph containing numerous errors in
the use of Standard Written English. For example, the following
passage has fourteen errors. Can you find them?
[1] The next time that your impressed with a
computers capabilities, consider the phenomenal abilities of John Milton,
author of the epic poem paradise lost. [2] Living in the
seventeenth century, Milton read ever book ever published up to his
time. [3] Moreover, he memorized most of what he read. [4] Milton
knowed the bible by heart and was able to quote chapter after chapter for
hours on end. [5] Not only could this brilliant poet recite the
Bible in his native english, but he could also quote scripture in Latin,
greek, Hebrew, and first-century aramaic. [6] Milton's mind was a
encyclopedia of facts about the worlds history, geography, and
culture. [7] The next time that you find yourself marveling at
all a computer "knows," think of John Milton. [8] The last person
who's summer reading list included all the books ever wrote.
Did you find the errors? Check yourself
here...
Students work individually or in groups to edit the passage in the
student workbook. Then, the errors in the passage are fully
explained on the videotape. Students receive immediate feedback on
their performance and thus strengthen their writing skills.
How
to Use This Course
This course can be integrated into existing English classes. The
program contains 30 lessons and thus can be used by teachers for daily or
weekly practice. Furthermore, students can use the program
individually through library or media facilities.
Two 90-minute videotapes present 30 passages written on a variety of
topics and containing over 300 examples of errors that beginning writers
commit. Explanations of how to correct errors are contained on the
videotapes. The passages illustrate various principles of
composition: description, narration, argumentation, classification,
comparison and contrast, and illustration.
A 100 page student workbook contains all 30 passages plus a special
Standard Written English review section: The Fifty Most Common
Problems that Writers Encounter.
Workbook Table of Contents
1.
Introduction
How to Use this
Course
Classroom Strategies
2. The 30 Passages
3. The Fifty Most Common
Problems
that Writers
Encounter
4. Additional Exercises
5. Answers to Additional Exercises
Edward Francisco
This course was developed by Edward Francisco, an award winning poet
and novelist who directs the Creative Writing Program at Pellissippi
Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Standard Written
English principles that are emphasized in this course are drawn from Mr.
Francisco's years of experience of teaching writing skills to middle
school, high school, and college students.
Mr. Francisco is the author of Death, Child, and Love: Poems
1980-2000. Here's what Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Coles has to
say about this volume in his introduction:
"Edward Francisco is very much a kindred spirit of William Carlos
Williams (wonderfully and admirably and affectingly so); both of them are
poets of considerable and fine feeling, who glimpse the world carefully,
gratefully, and with no small amount of awe, pleasure, wonder. Mr.
Francisco is a poet who sings of his dad, his son, his mother, his wife,
and who sings of life's unfolding dramas, so beloved and precious, so
stirring in their various possibilities, their times of hope or
melancholy."
Order this volume with your copy of Mastering the Paragraph.
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