An athlete practices his fundamental skills and learning the rules of the game under the watchful eye of a coach. The coach tells the player when he is doing things wrong and when he is doing things right. The athlete improves his skill by practicing the fundamentals while the coach is watching until they become second nature to him. And that's pretty much what you are doing when you write an essay for an English class, that is, I am the coach and the student is the athlete, and . . .well, what are the fundamentals? What skills are you are practicing? What rules are you learning?

Actually, the fundamental writing skills and writing rules are listed and discussed in The Harbrace Handbook. Look at the inside cover of your Handbook and you will see that the 39 chapters of the book are outlined there for you. You can imagine that those inside covers are like a checklist the coach keeps on every player, a sheet where the coach checks off the various skills that a player has -- blocking, tackling, catching the ball, throwing the ball, place kicking, etc. The more of these rules you are comfortable with, the fewer mistakes you make, the better your writing will be.

When I am reading your essay, I will notice mistakes that you have made, and I will tell you about the mistakes by placing marks on your paper. For example, you might write something like "Everybody on the team has their heart set on winning the District playoffs." Everybody is a singular word so that the pronouns referring to it must be singular, but the pronoun their is plural in form, so now you have a case of the pronoun not agreeing with its antecedent. So I circle the mistake and write "6b" in the margin near the marks I have just made. In effect, you have made a rules error similar to jumping offsides in football or stepping on the sideline in basketball, and I have called your attention to your mistake. You find out that way that you need to practice at the rules in Chapter 6b. And when you read over the rules in Chapter 6b, you learn that the sentence should have read "Everybody on the team has his heart set on winning the District playoffs."

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How To Use The Harbrace Handbook

When you get a paper back from me with marks on it, the marks are mostly references to sections of The Harbrace Handbook. Usually the marks are an indication of a chapter you need to study in the handbook. For example, if I see a case where a subject doesn't agree with a verb, I will mark that error on your paper and write "6a" somewhere near it. Sometimes, however, I will mark an error and write near it an abbreviation such as "frag" for sentence fragment or "agr" for agreement error. Don't let these marks confuse you. They are merely directions to you indicating which sections of the handbook you should be studying. Please be aware, therefore, that all of these symbols and abbreviations are indicated in a chart that is located on the front inside covers of your handbook. You can always use that chart to determine what chapters you need to work on.

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