Writing for 100 Days and Fairview's Guide to Composition and Essay Writing

by Gabriel Arquilevich

Fairview Publishing

These are both in my 100 Top Picks!

See the complete reviews in 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum.

These are great composition skills resources for junior and senior high students. I suggest starting with Writing for 100 Days to develop more fundamental skills, then shifting to Fairview's Guide to hone essay-writing skills. Both books were written for class groups and really work best with two or more students working on the same lessons and having some "class time" together. If this is not possible, a parent will need to interact with the student where it is essential in addition to his or her role as instructor.

Gabriel Arquilevich includes humorous touches in the lessons. This light-hearted approach makes both books a great mix of skills instruction, writing experience, and enjoyability.

Writing for 100 Days assumes that students already have a foundation in basic grammar and composition skills. It goes on from there to help students work on both writing style and grammar. Among the skills addressed are word economy, word choice, use of dialect and slang, sentence variety, transitions, tone, and organization plus some grammatical skill such as the use of parentheses and dashes.

Each lesson provides instruction followed by an exercise. Answers to the predictable exercises are at the back of the book. Student writing extends beyond the exercises to poetry and short story writing.

Examples of the types of writing students tackle are poetry, fiction, business letters, news reports, interviews, television commercials, technical, and travel.

Fairview's Guide to Composition and Essay Writing covers both structure and style using some familiar and some unique approaches. One unusual technique used in this book is analysis of professionally-written essays--sort of like an art student analyzing the work of great artists to learn their techniques. While there are some exercises with predictable answers as in Writing for 100 Days, lessons in this book require lots of actual essay writing as students tackle various types of essays. This book is best for senior high students.