About the Author

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During my 30+ years of teaching English to middle and high school students, I saw teaching trends come and go while the basics held strong: organizing an essay, annotating literature, note taking, studying vocabulary, and, of course, grammar! 

The link between language mastery and cognitive power is well-established, so it is no surprise that punctuation and grammar questions make up a significant portion of the reading and writing sections of popular standardized tests, including college entry exams like the SAT and ACT. 

Inexplicably, however, grammar in middle and high schools is often relegated to the occasional mini lesson, if it’s taught directly at all! 

Teaching grammar is a difficult chore–but steadily doing the hard work to lay a foundation in grammatical knowledge is so very important to intellectual growth.

Refined through trial and error with thousands of students and many generous colleagues, my Richbaub’s books were created to provide teachers with a smart, sensible way to deliver just the right amount of meaningful, practical grammar instruction intermediate writers need.

Students with a foundation in grammar can tap into this special knowledge to not only meet the technical requirements of academic writing and soar on standardized testing, but also to gain, as the research tells us, “cognitive power.”

Some of the most impactful writing lessons involve leveraging students’ grammatical knowledge: Upon learning about prepositional phrases, students may notice that far too many of their sentences begin with one. Upon learning about participial phrases, students may notice that very few of their sentences include them. Upon learning about the utility of subordinate clauses, students may adopt a better way–beyond the ubiquitous compound sentence–to increase the overall complexity of their written expression, especially regarding thesis statements.

In addition, lessons about run-on sentences, comma splice errors, dangling modifiers, parallel construction, pronoun usage, agreement, active vs. passive voice, etc. all require students to have a root system firmly established in a bed of grammar knowledge.

With grammar, the dividends are not always in sight or even within reach early on, but there is no doubt that the hard work of teaching grammar enriches the journey and facilitates the growth of students who are striving to become better writers and thinkers. 

Grammar is one of the vitally important “basics” your ELA curriculum should include!

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