Here’s how to make the connection between reading and writing in your classroom. With examples from authors your students are already reading, you can show them how they, too, can be more specific, more descriptive, and better organized in all of their classroom writing.

Using just a handful of grammar terms (think phrases and clauses), students first learn how to build their sentences far beyond the old subject-verb-direct object pattern, which inevitably turns choppy and boring. Instead, their writing becomes vivid, elegant, and flowing, in both their creative writing and their narrative essays.

As they move into expository writing, they learn the power of the topic sentence, with a clear vision of how to expand that idea, through parallel structures or progressively more detailed evidence to prove their point. They write knowing what to do next, instead of staring blankly at the screen or chewing their pencil.

This is the writing textbook that delivers immediate and lasting improvement in student writing. Originally published as The Christensen Rhetoric Program, the approach has now been updated and expanded through the work of Donald Stewart, a veteran classroom teacher and frequent presenter in schools and national conferences.