Lesson Plan 24: Topic/Comment in Academic Writing (West)

     “In other words” is a  great resource for teachers...I love the idea of 15-minute grammar lessons, especially since a teacher can incorporate these lessons in the beginning of each period, without having to devote a whole period on grammar. Although grammar was taught up to 11^th grade in my high school and I definitely benefited from our weekly grammar lessons, my colleagues and I didn’t teach grammar at all this year. I feel that the reason we didn’t is because most of us felt that that’s something students work on in middle school.  However, as I was reading through the book I realized that a lot of these lesson plans would be helpful for high school students as well, especially if they were taught as students are working on a major writing assignment.

      West writes that “An important objective for these lessons is to give students some concrete strategies for improving their writing when, for example, a teacher comments that their argument “needs development”” (P72). West then explains that “the first step in building up these skills is helping students to recognize sine of the ways that sentences work” (P 72). Lesson 24 focuses on identifying the topic and comment of sentences, and it is one of those lessons that I would teach while students were working on a major writing assignment. Being able to break down sentences is really important, and having students identify the topic and comment in sample sentences will help students write sentences that are more organized, and a lot more structured. I would teach this lesson when we would start revising our writing assignment, so that after students completed the worksheet on page 84, they can work on organizing the sentences that needed to be improved in their own writing.

            Overall, I feel that the strategies in this book can easily be incorporated within a unit (especially in middle school, where most periods are 90 minutes), and they can be so helpful to our students. Lastly, the lesson plans are very thorough, which makes planning a lot easier than having to plan a grammar lesson from scratch. 


Brown, David West. In other words:  lessons on grammar, code-switching, and academic writing.Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2009. Print