BUILDING WRITING SKILLS THE HANDS-ON WAY, 1st Edition is a student-friendly, developmental English textbook that teaches fluency in writing, reading, and critical thinking skills. Rich with multisensory exercises that activate multiple learning styles, this book covers the basic skills that lead to proficiency, while addressing the need for a new way to reach a diverse population of learners. The text engages students with hands-on activities that introduce concepts, while providing clear explanations to reinforce learning. Its structure addresses the challenges of teaching sentence-level and composition skills in a limited timeframe by allowing instructors to tailor skills work to student needs while focusing on communication and critical thinking. Adaptable to your teaching needs, the book is designed for paragraph and/or essay skills, with a reading skills section and high-interest anthology. Also available with the text--Instructor's Manual provides additional materials to reduce prep time and extend practice, and suggests ways to use the book depending on course needs.

Part I: WRITING AS COMMUNICATION AND EXPRESSION.
Introduction.
1. Freewriting: Thoughts into Words.
2. Generating and Organizing Ideas: Your Raw Materials.
3. Developing Powerful Paragraphs: A Structure for Ideas.
4. Crafting Purposeful Paragraphs: Strategies and Patterns.
5. Building an Essay: Concepts and Skills.
6. Writing for a Purpose: Essay Strategies and Structures.
7. The Revision Process: Refining Your Work.
8. The Editing Process: Polishing Your Work.
Part II: BUILDING A STRONG FOUNDATION.
Introduction.
9. Overview of Parts of Speech: A Crash Course.
10. Simple Sentence Structure: The Basic Construction Unit.
11. Using Commas Correctly: Working within the Sentence.
12. Compound Sentence Structure: Key to Understanding Punctuation.
13. Catching Run-ons: Using Sentence Structure Tools to Fix Errors.
14. Complex Sentences: Final Pieces of the Sentence Structure Puzzle.
15. Fixing Fragments: Editing Incomplete Ideas.
16. Modifiers: Expanding and Adding to Sentences.
17. Sentence Types: Creating Variety.
18. Nouns: The Stuff That Everything Is Made of.
19. Pronouns: Stand-ins for Nouns.
20. Verbs: The Action That Is in Every Sentence.
21. Adjectives and Adverbs: Words that Add More.
Part III: A HANDBOOK OF SENTENCE MECHANICS AND ACADEMIC CONVENTIONS.
22. A Guide to Punctuation Patterns.
23. Research Skills for Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Citing Sources.
24. Tips on Language and Style.
25. An Overview of Vocabulary Skills.
Part IV: BUILDING READING SKILLS THE HANDS-ON WAY.
26. Building Reading Skills.
SELECTED READINGS.
Part V: APPENDIXES.
A-1. Ways of Learning, Challenges, and the Brain.
A-2. Grammar and Usage Tips: Especially for ESL.
A-3. Employment Document Skills.
Glossary.
RESOURCE PAGES.
R-1. Conjunction Families.
R-2. Pronoun Lists.
R-3. Helping Verbs.
R-4. Common Irregular Verbs.

BUILDING WRITING SKILLS THE HANDS-ON WAY, 1st Edition is a student-friendly, developmental English textbook that teaches fluency in writing, reading, and critical thinking skills. Rich with multisensory exercises that activate multiple learning styles, this book covers the basic skills that lead to proficiency, while addressing the need for a new way to reach a diverse population of learners. The text engages students with hands-on activities that introduce concepts, while providing clear explanations to reinforce learning. Its structure addresses the challenges of teaching sentence-level and composition skills in a limited timeframe by allowing instructors to tailor skills work to student needs while focusing on communication and critical thinking. Adaptable to your teaching needs, the book is designed for paragraph and/or essay skills, with a reading skills section and high-interest anthology. Also available with the text--Instructor's Manual provides additional materials to reduce prep time and extend practice, and suggests ways to use the book depending on course needs. All grammar activities are grounded in the context of meaningful writing. Each core chapter of Part II includes "Building Editing Skills" and/or "Writing in Daily Life" guided editing activities with scaffolded exercises and awareness-building questions. Each Part II chapter ends with a section on "Working with the Real Thing," in which students receive specific, scaffolded guidance in transferring chapter skills into their own writing. The text includes a strong chapter on reading skills, prefacing a diverse anthology of scaffolded academic readings. The readings (with vocabulary definitions, pre- and post-reading questions, and writing prompts) include excerpts from academic textbooks, published articles and essays, and student essays, with paired argument essays. Content themes draw on topics of high interest and relevance to diverse adult learners. The diversity of the text is also reflected in rural, western, Hispanic/Latino, and Native American contemporary themes less well represented in many textbooks. In addition, "Reality Check" features share observations and learning tips from real students, which helps to foster confidence and a sense of community among learners from a variety of backgrounds. Learn by Doing! activities combine kinesthetic/tactile, visual, and auditory learning preferences to help students overcome the "print barrier" and make grammar concepts easier to learn.