Recent arrivals ~ two old books

My friend Donna is a former English teacher.  When she came to lunch at my house on Monday, she brought two books she thought I might use with my writing classes.

The Write Source by Patrick Sebranek, Dave Kemper, and Verne Meyer (1987) is a handbook for students.  Flipping through it, I quickly saw how outdated some of it is.  For example, there's a handwriting chart inside the back cover; remember our recent discussion of cursive?  (See the comment section of this post.)  Students are no longer being taught cursive writing.

The Write Source also has a section on how to use the card catalog at the library (pp. 190-191).  Okay, raise your hands if you remember the tiny wooden drawers of a card catalog.  It was full of 3x5-sized cards with information about books laboriously typed onto each card (yes, using a typewriter).  I can imagine one of my students saying, "That's a strange way to Google something!"

But some things never change, like "Writing the Paragraph" (p. 95):

Prewriting:  Selecting a Subject
Planning:  Preparing the Subject
Writing:  Writing the First Draft
Revising:  Improving the Writing

The Least You Should Know about English Writing Skills by Teresa Ferster Glazier (1996) is the fifth edition of a book which already has a tenth edition, but the premise intrigues me.  Here it is, from page 2:

"Most English textbooks try to teach you as much as they can.  This one will teach you the least it can -- and still help you learn to write acceptably.  You won't have to bother with predicate nouns and subordinating conjunctions and participial phrases and demonstrative pronouns and all those terms you've been hearing about for years.  You can get along without them if you'll learn thoroughly a few basic rules.  You do have to know how to spell common words; you do have to recognize subjects and verbs to avoid writing fragments and run-together sentences; you do have to know a few rules of punctuation -- but rules will be kept to a minimum."

The first book has lots of drawings by Chris Krenzke, with little characters like the one on the front cover. The pictures make it more visually appealing than the second book, which has a few examples (like underlining subjects and verbs) but no pictures.  I may find more in the second book to use, though, like the list of "words often confused" (pp. 7-10).  Have you noticed people misusing these words?

accept, except
affect, effect
are, or, our ["respect are language by getting it right"]
brake, break
choose, chose
dessert, desert
do, due [and I'll add dew]
feel, fill
have, of [writers use "should of" when thinking "should've"]
hear, here
it's, its [it's contracts "it is," and its shows possession]
knew, new
know, no

About the dessert-desert duo, the author says, "Dessert is the sweet one, the one you like two helpings of.  So give it two helpings of s."



I think I'll make my own list of problem words.  Can you think of others for my list?