English Essentials

John Langan has taught reading and writing at Atlantic Cape Community College for more than 25 years. The author of a popular series of college textbooks on both writing and reading, John enjoys the challenge of developing instructive materials that are clear and lively. Before teaching, he earned advanced degrees in writing at Rutgers University and in reading at Rowan University. He also spent a year writing fiction that “is now at the back of a drawer waiting to be discovered and acclaimed posthumously.” While in school, he supported himself by working as a truck driver, a machinist, a battery assembler, a hospital attendant, and an apple packer. In addition to his wife and Philly sports teams, his passions include reading and conveying to nonreaders the pleasure and power of books. Through Townsend Press, his educational publishing company, he has developed the nonprofit “Townsend Library”—a collection of more than 100 new and classic stories that appeal to readers of any age.

• Preface to the Instructor IntroductionAbout the BookBecoming a Better WriterWriting Assignments Part One: Fifteen Basic Skills Preview 1: Parts of Speech2: Subjects and Verbs 3: Irregular Verbs 4: Subject-Verb Agreement 5: Sentence Types 6: Fragments I 7: Fragments II 8: Run-Ons and Comma Splices I 9: Run-Ons and Comma Splices II 10: The Comma 11: The Apostrophe 12: Quotation Marks 13: Homonyms 14: Capital Letters 15: Parallelism Part Two: Extending the Skills Preview 16: Preparing a Paper 17: Punctuation Marks 18: Pronoun Forms 19: Pronoun Problems 20: Adjectives and Adverbs 21: Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers 22: Word Choice 23: Numbers and Abbreviations 24: More about Subjects and Verbs 25: More about Subject-Verb Agreement 26: More about Verbs 27: Even More about Verbs 28: More about Run-Ons and Comma Splices 29: More about Commas 30: More about Apostrophes 31: More about Quotation Marks 32: More about Homonyms 33: More about Capital Letters Part Three: Proofreading Preview 34: Basics about Proofreading 35: Ten Proofreading Tests Part Four: Related Matters Preview 36: Spelling Improvement 37: Dictionary UseIndex