The Least You Should Know about English

I received a date when it would arrive and a few days later received another telling me it would take longer. if you need this within a week or two don't get it.

I love how you shipped my book out so quickly. It is in excellent condition and I want to say, "THANK YOU for being HONEST. a very rare quality now days! Keep up the great work! thanks for making my educational text books affordable...

I'm using this textbook in a college level fundamentals of writing course, where its graphics-free, jargon-free approach is proving to be very helpful. Wilson and Glazier tackle the fundamentals of Standard Written English as writing problems that are common for intermediate-beginning writers of English. Each chapter covers a common writing problem and includes a clear, plain-spoken definition, examples, solution, and practice exercises. Basically, each chapter helps students to build a tool-kit that they can students use to repair their writing errors--the chapters also work as good reminders of "the basics" in other writing classrooms. The exercises are varied and interesting and tests appear every few chapters for review. Most of the book covers sentence and paragraph level issues. The last few chapters cover writing short essays.

--* Same review written for Form B *-- I love this series -- it's straightforward and easy to teach in portions rather than having to go sequentially through the book as you do with other workbooks. However, I was ding-dong enough to buy all three forms -- A, B, and C. If you read the footnotes at the beginning of B and C, you'll note the instructions/content/topics are the same in all three Forms -- the only thing that changes are the exercises. For my purposes in a high school English classroom, only one Form would have been fine since I could have created my own additional exercises as needed. The information covers basic parts of speech through essay writing and includes remedial through advanced types of exercises and topics. I particularly like the possessives and contractions as well as the doubling-before-suffix lessons. I can't say the information is rare, but it's nice to have it all in one handy reference that's genuinely full of practical instruction and lacks unnecessary narrative.

This text has aided me in setting up a variety of exercises for my own high school students. Although it is geared for college students, many of the concepts can be helpful on the high school level as well. The author's organization gave me a way to approach some core problems most English teachers meet. I shortened a few sections that met my special needs, taught them with my own examples, then had students create their own sentences. I checked their work for appropriateness, then used them for group work. Involvement made the students pay attention; and seeing their own sentences on the practice sheets and quizzes encouraged the young people to create better sentences. I have advised several of my former students in college to look for the book as an aid when they write about having writing problems that deal with usage and grammar on college papers. Also, I've shared the text with many of my teacher friends as an excellent review source. It's one of my most used reference books. I am forever grateful to finding this text in a college bookstore that I roamed through checking what was being used by college English classes back in the 80's. So happy to see it is still in print.