Stepping Stones: A Guided Approach to Writing Sentences and Paragraphs

577 Pages·2012·17.57 MB·English

by  Chris Juzwiak

Study, practice, and explore.
bedfordstmartins.com/steppingstones
You need value, and you want practical help with improving
your writing. The Student Site for Stepping Stones gives you
both, with lots of free and open resources that you can use any-
where, anytime.
• Access hundreds of additional exercises tailored to your needs.
• Create a study plan.
• Try more grammar tutorials.
• View additional models of student paragraphs and essays.
• Find useful forms for brainstorming, clustering, and outlining.
• Discover a glossary of grammar terms.
. . . and much more.
Brief Contents
PART ONE The Academic Paragraph 1
1 Seeing the Big Picture: Paragraphs, Purpose, and Audience 3
2 Developing a Topic 20
3 Organizing Your Ideas 39
4 Outlining Your Paragraph 66
5 Composing the Paragraph 88
6 Revising 113
PART TwO Expanding Your writing 137
7 Developing Details 139
8 Patterns of Development 171
9 Moving from Paragraphs to Essays 203
PART ThREE Grammar for Academic writing 223
10 The Simple Sentence 225
11 The Compound Sentence 255
12 The Complex Sentence 302
13 More Complex Sentences 328
14 Sentences with Modifiers 356
15 Using Verbs Correctly 381
16 Using Pronouns Correctly 416
PART fOuR A writer’s Reader 439
17 School and Learning 441
18 Prejudice and Forgiveness 449
19 Parents and Parenting 454
20 Work and Career 461
21 People and Pets 467
22 Deprivation and Privilege 473
23 Addiction and Risks 480
APPENDICES Appendix A: Punctuation and Capitalization 487
Appendix B: Guidelines for ESL Writers 500
Index 517
Reference Material R-1
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Instructor’s Annotated Edition
Stepping
Stones
A Guided Approach to writing
Sentences and Paragraphs
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Stepping
Stones
SECOND EDITION
A Guided Approach to writing
Sentences and Paragraphs
Chris Juzwiak
Glendale Community College
Bedford/St. Martin’s
Boston ◆ New York
Instructor’s Annotated Edition
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for Bedford/St. Martin’s
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Copyright © 2012, 2009 by Bedford/St. Martin’s
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
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ISBN: 978-0-312-67599-8 (Student edition)
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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on page 515, which constitutes
an extension of the copyright page. It is a violation of the law to reproduce these selections by any
means whatsoever without the written permission of the copyright holder.
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Preface for Instructors
If your teaching experiences are like mine, many of the students entering
your classroom have encountered repeated difficulty in the past. As chil-
dren or young adults, they may have had negative experiences learning
writing and grammar, considering these pursuits boring or confusing. They
may even enter your course expecting to fail. Their prospects for success
are not improved by textbooks that assume that students can make great
strides in their writing skills based on minimal examples and activities.
For example, how many students can truly learn to generate good ideas
based on a few examples of clustering, listing, and freewriting and a few
activities? And will they really be able to organize their ideas effectively
based on only one or two examples of outlining? Often, when students are
asked to make big leaps from their current skill levels to the skill levels
required for college success, they become frustrated—and many of them
give up.
Stepping Stones addresses these challenges head-on. The book is based
on the premise that if students are taken through a thorough and seamless
sequence of engaging instruction and activities, they will master writing and
grammar skills with enthusiasm. More advanced students will proceed quickly
through the activities, gaining confidence, while less skilled students will get
all the “stepping stones” they need to reach mastery. All along, students learn
by doing practices that grow incrementally more challenging as they move
through each chapter. Building skills and confidence gradually means that no
student gets left behind.
on the first edition
Over my years of teaching, I became dissatisfied with the available text-
books, finding that they either presented material in a manner that did not
interest students or oversimplified instruction, making it difficult for stu-
dents to truly learn writing and grammar concepts and transfer them to their
own writing. Therefore, I spent nights and weekends writing my own writ-
ing and grammar materials, developing carefully sequenced instruction and
exercises. The response from my students was immediate and enthusiastic.
When I sought to avoid boredom and confusion with clear, inventive, and fun
vii
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viii Preface for Instructors
materials, I saw a transformation in students’ attitude and behavior: They
became readily self-motivated, demanding more high-quality, high- interest
learning activities and tools.
Starting in 2004, I directed a three-year Carnegie Foundation SPECC
grant (Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges) in
which my colleagues and I were able to test more thoroughly the materials that
I developed and to study students’ writing and learning processes. We spent
hundreds of hours observing students as they wrote and completed exercises,
and even more time watching videotape of students working at computers,
noting how they started and stopped compositions; cut, added, and moved
text; and generally worked through their individual composing processes. We
also interviewed students about their writing processes and responses to vari-
ous learning materials. The students in the study responded enthusiastically,
and their skills improved markedly. Through this research, my colleagues and
I became convinced that developmental learners flourish when their critical
thinking and imagination are challenged with fresh, precisely honed sequences
of instruction and activities. The positive responses to the materials that I de-
veloped prompted me to write the first edition of Stepping Stones.
on the second edition
The second edition of Stepping Stones has also benefited enormously from
my ongoing pedagogical research, conversations with colleagues from across
the nation, and—most important—from three years of using the first edition
in my classroom. I used the text in several classes each semester with a vigi-
lant eye to refining the content, looking for cues from my students on how
well the instructional sequences in the book were working. The pedagogical
premise and promise of Stepping Stones—that students won’t have to make
unreasonable “cognitive leaps” within the instructional sequences—guided
my revision. I am confident that both you and your students will benefit from
the more finely honed content of this new edition.
Beyond the classroom, my revision strategies were informed by new ped-
agogical research, funded by grants from the California Basic Skills Initiative
(CBSI) and the Hewlett Foundation. At my campus, twelve developmental com-
position instructors and a host of student co-inquirers participated in IMPACT
(Incremental, Motivational Pedagogy & Assessment Cycles Training), a program
developed with funds from CBSI. We confirmed that developmental students
thrive on clear, carefully structured learning sequences that move smoothly
from basic to advanced levels, providing ample activities. (We like to call it “drill
and thrill” to correct the misconception that sustained practice must be boring.)
Our instructional innovations have realized a solid 15 percent increase in student
success in our college’s basic writing program. The second edition of Stepping
Stones incorporates many of the best features of this progressive pedagogy, such
as training in “organizational cognition” (critical thinking about outlines) and a
“build it / fix it” approach to sentence construction and grammaticality.
Finally, during a year’s sabbatical, I was able to attend conferences and visit
campuses in seven states, discussing basic skills pedagogy with scores of tal-
ented, dedicated faculty, some of whom had worked with Stepping Stones and
others of whom were simply eager to hear about new instructional approaches.
Countless refinements in the book resulted from these dialogues. In fact, of all
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