Writing Made Easy
Reviewed by Ruth Chambers, Instructor

Writing Made Easy is an easy-to-use workbook that provides students with fundamental information on parts of speech. What makes this 148 page book unique is its use of real-life Canadian stories to give students the opportunity to practice their newly learned skills. For example, “Four-Legged Snowmobiles” is about dog sled teams in Canada’s northern communities and is used to test students’ knowledge of nouns; “Northern Lights,” a poem about the aurora borealis, is used for students to practice their skills in adjective usage. The double-spaced stories and poems allow students to identify grammar in context.

There are 29 lessons in the coil-bound book, covering many facets of parts of speech. There are several lessons on nouns: common, proper, pronoun, and possessive. The verb lessons include information on past, present, and future action verbs, linking verbs, and irregular verbs. Numerous lessons on adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and connectives complete the parts of speech data. Each lesson in this soft-covered book starts with a definition and examples of the different parts of speech. Next, students are instructed to read through a short, one-page story or poem and find examples of the just-taught part of speech. Then, students are given the opportunity to write paragraphs or sentences relating to the story or poem, identifying the part of speech covered in that lesson. Thus, each lesson gives students at least three exposures to the new skill: learning the definition, seeing the concept in something they have read, and using and identifying the concept in their own writing.

The structure of this book, with stand-alone lessons, allows instructors to pick and choose which lessons they want to use. The lessons do not need to be taught in chronological order. In addition, the short lessons encourage the introduction of outside current material, such as newspaper articles or short paragraphs, to give students added practice in newly learned skills.

This workbook is not reproducible, but its reasonable price makes the purchase of a class set a manageable acquisition. This book would be a valuable resource for any literacy practitioner.