This is an essential writing course for all high school students, to make sure that your student has critical high school essay writing foundations in place. Give your high school student exactly what’s needed for writing well-crafted sentences and paragraphs—including the absolute “must-have” knowledge, review, and practice for the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and prepositional phrases, and compound sentence structures. Learn to use transitions and connectives to make your paragraphs smooth; the use of quoted material to support your ideas; and the use of summary and paraphrase that’s required in all academic writing. Even if your student has learned foundational concepts before, the approach in his class is to use high school vocabulary and structures that are more complex and needed for upper-level writing. From mastering the details that are holding your student back to providing much-needed practice, help your student perfect the essential tools for high school writing with this course.

Class 1: Using strong nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in well-constructed sentences
Class 2: Perfecting higher-level capitalization, punctuation, and the use of quotation marks in dialogue in academic writing
Class 3: Perfecting linear writing, transitions, and connectives in sentence and paragraph writing
Class 4: Writing with summary and paraphrase
Class 5: Answering essay questions: structure, form, and content I
Class 6: Answering essay questions: structure, form, and content II

Total Number of Classes: Six (6)
Prerequisites: Because courses in the program are sequential, for your student’s success, it is required that your student take the 9-Series courses before enrolling in this course. If your student is unable to take the previous courses LIVE, then he or she can watch the recordings on Unlimited Access before taking this course. Special permission may be granted for attending this course without prerequisites, and a passing score on the Aquinas Writing Advantage Writing Assessment allows you to begin high school writing courses with this course. Please contact [email protected] for any questions on permissions.
Suggested Grade Level: 9th – 12th grade
Duration: 55 minutes
Suggested Credit: When combined with the 9-4 Course, this course is worth a full semester’s credit of writing.
Required Materials: All documents are turned in as Microsoft Word documents. If you do not own Microsoft Word 2007 or a later version, you can use a system such as Google Docs that converts to Word documents FREE. All other learning materials are provided FREE.
Homework: There is an estimated one to four hours per week for homework outside of class time, depending on the student’s ability.

Live, Interactive Courses

During the week, multiple course sections, times, and instructors are offered for this course. Sign up for the time and the instructor that best meets your needs. Click here to see the days and instructors for the LIVE course offerings — and to sign up for a LIVE course.

Recorded, Independent-Learning Course

When you sign up for Unlimited Access and take this recorded course, your instructor is the designer and Director of Aquinas Writing Advantage, Erin M. Brown, MA, MFA (aka author EB Conroy/Erin Brown Conroy).