Courses

Join us in this 1.5 hr. weekly small-group class as we continue to learn to craft strong paragraphs using The Writing Revolution progression. Each week, there are both paragraph skills to practice, and sentence level skills to continue consolidating.

Paragraphs are taught as mini-essays in this class, giving learners practice with essay skills on a smaller scale. They practice creating topic sentences that state the three to four categories of details being used to support it, building their thesis statement skills. They also practice using and generating categories to support a topic along with providing sufficient details using point form to organize their ideas. In a paragraph, these categories and their points become the detail or supporting sentences while in an essay each category becomes a supporting paragraph. Learners also practice writing conclusions by restating the topic in different words, being sensitive to the order we used to support our claim in the topic sentence. Additionally, learners explore the use of transition words, appropriate word choice and tone for a variety of audiences and purposes, and receiving and providing feedback on each other’s writing, among many other things.

The targeted practice each week begins with reinforcing working with simple, compound, and complex sentences and making sure that building blocks such as punctuation and spelling are also being used correctly. Later in the year, we use William Strong’s Sentence Composing to develop close reading skills and paragraph skills in the context of working with someone else’s sentences. 

In a typical week, the weekly writing practice for Writing 2: Academic Paragraphs will consist of targeted skill practice and the writing of a paragraph outline or the writing of a paragraph.

 This course is only open to those who have completed Writing 1, Writing 2, or the equivalent and will continue with consolidating previously seen paragraph skills and proceed with honing their paragraph skills. In order to ensure accurate skill placement, permission of the instructor is required for this class.

We will be focusing only on academic writing in this class. Creative Writing is being offered separately. (see options below)