For too long, sentence instruction has been heavy on correctness and terminology (as in “mind your grammar”) and light on play and experimentation. Or it has been abandoned altogether. In this lively book, Marty Brandt sets out to change all that.
It is partly the story of a teacher hitting a plateau in mid-career, deeply frustrated by the flatness of his students’ writing, particularly as they struggled with more academic tasks. But it also tells the story of important but neglected research in sentence instruction, which Brandt revives, reinventing his instruction by explicitly teaching the possibilities of sentences.
In Between the Commas, he identifies three “pillars” of sentence instruction:
