Writers' Choices: Grammar for Effective Writing

Intended for college and advanced high school students as well as for teachers wishing to strengthen their understanding of English grammar, Writers' Choices: Grammar for Effective Writing covers English syntax from parts of speech, verb forms, and basic sentence patterns to dependent clauses, verbal phrases, absolute constructions, and parallelism and coordination. It aims to teach students that syntactic choices have rhetorical effects and to show students how an understanding of syntax can expand their range of choice when writing.

Every chapter combines syntax with rhetorical grammar. The book uses diagramming to help make sentence analysis visible and sentence combining to show how sentences are put together. Along with many diagramming and sentence combining exercises, all of them with varied and culturally diverse content, there are exercises for working with sentences in larger contexts and regular opportunities for students to compose their own sentences. There is no filling in of blanks, no dwelling on errors. The book is based on a belief that it is a lot more useful to write scores of correct sentences than it is to fix incorrect ones. It doesn't say, "Don't do this — it makes your writing wrong." It says, "Try this — it makes your writing strong!"