Sometimes it's better to start small, with a sentence.

Every English teacher has experienced it: students staring at an empty page, seemingly paralyzed by a writing assignment. When this happens, it may be time to back off from the Big Idea approach to the art of reading and writing, and zero in on a single sentence.

In this book, a master teacher offers a complete guide to a sentence-level approach. Helping students recognize the techniques that make sentences great is the first step, and there are plenty of examples here from YA novels, TV shows, and song lyrics as well as the novels, poetry, and nonfiction pieces that form the canon of middle and high school reading lists. Lesson plans include activities to introduce the featured element of style; questions to guide students in their analysis; and writing prompts and activities to spark students' interest and creativity.

With this Little-to-Big strategy, students move quickly from analysis of the words between two periods to the universe of ideas of which that sentence is a part. They may even be eager to write their own