Catherine and Katharine’s sentence-based, do-it-yourself writing curriculum, the first of its kind, appears in Europe in the Modern World: A New Narrative History Since 1500 (London: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Publication date: September 30, 2016
“Instructors and students alike will … find the self-directed writing exercises included at the end of each chapter to be an invaluable means of enhancing writing and thinking skills.”
–Geoffrey Clark, The State University of New York at Potsdam
Fourteen step-by-step lessons empower students to teach themselves college writing using the content of the textbook. Students learn history as they write history.
Growing out of precision teaching and functional linguistics, the lessons explicitly teach techniques and devices professional writers use by ear after years of reading and writing——techniques most novices never learn at all.
Students learn:
- A sentence-based method for constructing 2 types of thesis statements
- How to sequence an argument through the supporting ideas contained in the thesis sentence
- Cohesion devices like end focus, topic chains, and the use of passive voice and clefting to create sentence flow
Even skilled writers will find that a conscious, explicit knowledge of these techniques can help them fix prose that isn’t flowing.
Catherine & Katharine 