Pennington Publishing

The Pennington Manual of Style has been designed to serve as a writer’s reference guide for fourth-twelfth grade students and their teachers.This style manual is fully interactive with a downloadable comment bank of 438 essay e-comments to save grading time and improve the quality and quantity of essay response... and, best of all, teachers are licensed to print The Pennington Manual of Style for each of their students and post this helpful resource on their own class websites.

For students, The Pennington Manual of Style provides all the easy-to-understand writing tips to help developing writers learn what is good writing and why it is good writing. Students also learn what is wrong, why it is wrong, and how to fix errors. This 47-page manual is organized as follows: Essay Organization and Development (Introduction, Body, and Conclusion), Coherence, Word Choice, Sentence Variety, Writing Style, Format and Citations, Parts of Speech, Grammatical Forms, Usage, Sentence Structure, Types of Sentences, Mechanics, and Conventional Spelling Rules.

For teachers, this guide provides a common language of writing instruction and discourse to use when students submit paper or online essays. A download link inserts the entire 438 essay e-comments bank from the style manual into the Autocorrect function of Microsoft Word® 2003, 2007, and 2010 (Windows XP, Vista, and Win 7 all work fine). Teachers simply select an essay e-comment, type in its short alphanumeric code, then click to insert it into a document for printing, into an e-mail, or into a Microsoft Word® comment bubble for an online essay. These essay e-comments not only identify errors; they explain how to revise the writing with clear definitions, explanations, and examples. It’s easy to add in personalized comments, even audio comments. Teachers will save time, yet do a more thorough job of essay response.

Upon purchase (make sure to register with your email), you will receive an e-mail with the essay e-comments download link and the Quick Start Guide attachments.

The essay e-comments have been derived from the author’s comprehensive curricula: Teaching Essay Strategies, Teaching Spelling and Vocabulary, Teaching Grammar and Mechanics, and Teaching Reading Strategies. Each curriculum uses the same language of instruction as does The Pennington Manual of Style. Each curriculum provides diagnostic assessments to determine the individual needs of students in writing, spelling, grammar, mechanics, and reading. Each curriculum provides targeted worksheets (all with formative assessments) and activities to enable the teacher to differentiate instruction according to the diagnostic data. Each curriculum has been designed to teach the writing, language, and reading strands of the Common Core State Standards.

NOTE: The essay e-comments supplement the existing 2010 Autocorrects, but the download will replace any custom comments you may have added. So, if you have added in tons of Autocorrects, you may want to think about this. For most of us, who never have added in personalized Autocorrects, it's not an issue, and the download automatically backs up your original Autocorrects file.