This book was written during a time of a recession in my country. I am a few days away from being a bastard case. My father bailed out on me and my mother. I fell in love with doing crimes at the age of 12. I caught my first felony at 15. I have a lot of stories to tell from first hand. I stripped myself away from blessing at an early age. You can see some of my childhood achievements at www.google.com and search for Zakee Howze. I have good friends that were murdered or had to go before the creator because of their reasons. I started feeling like nobody loved me. Actually some people did stop loving me. You the man when have the money, but what about being a good person? That doesn’t matter to a lot of people anymore. One thing I learned is that when materialistic items are stripped away from people you will see nothing but their true character. I had to write this book because I witnessed too many people who do not control their own life.

Considering the composition classroom as a mad scientist’s laboratory, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition introduces different kinds of writing as experiments. Writing an essay is a task that can strike fear into a student’s heart, but performing an experiment licenses creativity and doesn’t presume that one knows the outcome from the start. The Mad Scientist’s Guide covers the kinds of writing most often required on college campuses, while also addressing important steps and activities frequently overlooked in composition guides, such as revision and peer reviewing. Actual examples of student writing are included throughout, as are helpful reminders and tips to help students polish their skills. Above all, the Mad Scientist’s Guide seeks to make writing fun.

Considering the composition classroom as a mad scientist’s laboratory, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition introduces different kinds of writing as experiments. Writing an essay is a task that can strike fear into a student’s heart, but performing an experiment licenses creativity and doesn’t presume that one knows the outcome from the start. The Mad Scientist’s Guide covers the kinds of writing most often required on college campuses, while also addressing important steps and activities frequently overlooked in composition guides, such as revision and peer reviewing. Actual examples of student writing are included throughout, as are helpful reminders and tips to help students polish their skills. Above all, the Mad Scientist’s Guide seeks to make writing fun.

Writing Made Easy: Just the Basics by Timothy Sharkey explains how to make writing easy. It provides a “just-the-basics” approach to writing and it eliminates the complicated information that gets in the way. It includes expert definitions and helpful examples of what is really needed in writing – with professional scholarship and a literary sensibility – from an author who has taught English 101 and English 102 classes in college for over 15 years. Writing Made Easy: Just the Basics is the culmination of Timothy Sharkey’s 15-year effort to put the good information about writing into one book. Writing Made Easy: Just the Basics contains the following information: —Grammar, Syntax, Usage, Diction, Etymology —Mechanics: abbreviations, capitalization, spelling —Agreement Tips: past, present, and future; singular and plural; first, second, and third person voices —Using whom correctly —Punctuation Marks: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, quotation marks, semicolon, slash —Sentences: required ingredients, sentence mistakes (sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and comma-splice sentences – and how to correct them) —Paragraphs: required ingredients; introduction, body, and concluding paragraphs; transition words —Rhetorical Techniques: alliteration, allusion, hyperbole, metaphor, onomatopoeia, irony, parallel construction, personification —Arguing Well: critical thinking, dialectics; Aristotle’s ethos, pathos, & logos; the Socratic Method, common ground —Fallacies: ad hominem attack, begging the question, coded language, double-edged sword, hasty analogy, red herring, slippery slope, straw man, etc. —Research Tips: advanced Google searches, Boolean operators, databases, Google Scholar, Google News, WolframAlpha, the CIA Factbook, etc. —Research Paper (MLA 9th Edition): direct quotes, indirect quotes, interpolations, in-text citations, works cited page, hanging indents, correct formatting —Writing Terms defined: bombastic, cliche, colloquial, concise, diction, etymology, euphemism, figure of speech, hyperbole, jargon, metaphor, oxymoron, redundant, rhetoric, slang, succinct, verbose, etc. —Latin Terms for Writers defined: a priori, ad hoc, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, alumnus, bona fide, de facto, ibidem (ibid.), ipso facto, non sequiter, per se, prima facie, quasi, reductio ad absurdem, sic, summa cum laude, magna cum laude, verbatim, etc. —Sample Essays included: descriptive essay, argumentative essay, research paper (MLA 9th Edition) —Writing approaches, insights, and advice

Some teachers love grammar and some hate it, but nearly all struggle to find ways of making the mechanics of English meaningful to kids. As a middle school teacher, Jeff Anderson also discovered that his students were not grasping the basics, and that it was preventing them from reaching their potential as writers. Jeff readily admits, “I am not a grammarian, nor am I punctilious about anything,” so he began researching and testing the ideas of scores of grammar experts in his classroom, gradually finding successful ways of integrating grammar instruction into writer's workshop. Mechanically Inclined is the culmination of years of experimentation that merges the best of writer's workshop elements with relevant theory about how and why skills should be taught. It connects theory about using grammar in context with practical instructional strategies, explains why kids often don't understand or apply grammar and mechanics correctly, focuses on attending to the “high payoff,” or most common errors in student writing, and shows how to carefully construct a workshop environment that can best support grammar and mechanics concepts. Jeff emphasizes four key elements in his teaching:short daily instruction in grammar and mechanics within writer's workshop;using high-quality mentor texts to teach grammar and mechanics in context;visual scaffolds, including wall charts, and visual cues that can be pasted into writer's notebooks;regular, short routines, like “express-lane edits,” that help students spot and correct errors automatically.Comprising an overview of the research-based context for grammar instruction, a series of over thirty detailed lessons, and an appendix of helpful forms and instructional tools, Mechanically Inclined is a boon to teachers regardless of their level of grammar-phobia. It shifts the negative, rule-plagued emphasis of much grammar instruction into one which celebrates the power and beauty these tools have in shaping all forms of writing.