Effective Sentences uses high-interest readings, useful vocabulary, and straightforward grammar lessons to teach sentence writing. The text targets students--both traditional ESL/ESOL students and Generation 1.5--who write English at a basic level but need help producing accurate sentences with a complexity that matches their thoughts.

Effective Sentences has a two-part structure. First, students learn to recognize basic sentence structure and closely examine elements to take the mystery out of English sentences. Then, they learn to use adjectives, objects, and prepositional phrases to create compound and complex sentence structures from simple sentences.

Grammar presented is driven by the students' needs and the stories-written by language students at this level--within each chapter. Vocabulary is open-ended and highlights words in the readings that students may find difficult. Paragraph structure is also introduced, along with topic sentences, general to specific movement, and sentence variety within paragraph structure.