With a myriad of writing exercises representing many different types of writing and plenty of revising and editing practice, this book offers students a wide variety of relevant writing practice. Eight units include: revising and rewriting; technical writing; expository writing; personal essays; essays of opinion; descriptive writing; letter writing; and writing for speaking. A variety of different short (often fun) writing assignments is offered through the course of each unit, designed to help build writing skills in each area, not just to provide “busywork“ assignments. Although units can be done in any particular order, completing the lengthy revising and editing unit will help students establish good revising traits throughout the rest of the units. Each unit begins with a page or two for the teacher, including teaching ideas and instructions for each assignment in the unit. The reproducible assignments follow, with six to eight exercises for most units, and over twenty for the revising unit. In general, the exercises at the beginning of each unit are less intensive as far as actual writing goes, and designed more for the writer to become comfortable with that form of writing. Exercises build in complexity through the unit, until the student is writing in the featured form with perhaps just a prompt to get him started. Some writing exercises include: revising, editing and proofreading practice on given pieces of writing; writing “how-to“ paragraphs, rearranging given notes into an essay, writing personal essays; writing an essay about a senior citizen; writing a toy or game review; writing a complete description of an object without naming it; writing a comparison and contrast paragraph; writing letters to a company, celebrity and editor; writing business e-mails; writing a sales pitch, writing a short script; and plenty more. An appendix includes scoring rubrics for specific feedback. - Jess