John Langan,
Atlantic Cape Community College Beth Johnson Lisa Salem-Wiseman,
Humber Institute of Technology
ISBN: 0070980403 Copyright year: 2009
Overview
English Essentials is designed to help students quickly master practical English skills they need every day. Parts Two through Six begin with a list of objectives, to quickly identify the skills students can expect to have acquired by the end of the unit. This is followed by a diagnostic pre-test to help identify which skills a student may already be familiar with and which skills may need more attention. In each chapter, basic information is presented in a very clear way on the first page; the pages that follow reinforce that information with activities, and each chapter concludes with a series of tests to help you track your progress. Learning through doing – the most effective way to learn.
Author Lisa Salem-Wiseman went one step further to engage the students. As well as learning through doing, students also learn by being able to engage and relate with the subject. To that end, Dr. Salem-Wiseman interviewed students across the country, and wove their stories into the fabric of this text. Student photographers were then hired to do a photo essay of each of these students – truly this book is made for students, and by students.
PART ONE: Becoming a Better Writer
The first part of this book presents the writing process in a brief, clear, and easy-to-understand manner. The information covered in this section includes:
The basic goals of writing
Paragraph and essay structure
The importance of supporting your points
Different patterns of organizing your support
The writing process, from pre-writing to formatting, to proofreading
Topics for writing paragraphs and/or essays
PART TWO: The Basics
This section introduces you to some basic grammar skills, including:
Recognizing the various parts of speech and types of sentences
Working with subjects and verbs
Using the correct pronoun form, article, and modifier (adjective or adverb)
PART THREE: Beyond the Basics
Once you have mastered some of the basics, it’s time to move on to the next level of essential skills. These include:
Making verbs agree with their subjects
Avoiding common sentence errors such as fragments, run-ons, comma splices, misplaced and dangling modifiers, and faulty parallelism
PART FOUR: Punctuation
Now it’s time to introduce some rules for using punctuation marks such as:
Apostrophes
Quotation marks
Commas
Colons and semi-colons
PART FIVE: Mechanics and Spelling
This final section covers some important but often-overlooked skills, such as:
improving spelling
correctly using frequently misused words
learning when to capitalize words
correctly using numbers and abbreviations
PART SIX: Proofreading
An important part of becoming a good writer is learning to proofread—to carefully check the next-to-final draft of a paper for grammar, punctuation, and other mistakes. This chapter provides you with some hints for improving your proofreading skills, as well as ten proofreading tests with which to practice those skills.
2009