Writing Smart Book

Used as the writing text for a low-intermediate writing class at a community college. On the whole, my students didn't find this text as useful as its predecessor (Weaving It Together, Book 2 by Milada Broukal), although the book did have certain strengths, such as making the writing and editing process explicit and providing plenty of good model paragraphs. However, I was not a fan of some of the exercises that involved sentence parsing -- analyzing sentence structure. For example, here are the directions for one exercise to analyze complex sentences:

"Step 1: Underline the independent clauses with a solid line and the dependent clauses with a broken line.

Step 2: Draw a circle around the subordinate.

Step 3: Add a comma if one is needed."

Well, as you might imagine, some confusion ensued, and at times I spent more time explaining how to do the exercise than in getting the point of the exercise across. I found myself either not assigning these exercises or amending the directions to make them less confusing.