Ghost of Camp Whispering Pines by Susan Korman (2000, Reinforced Hardcover)

I'm ordinarily wary of books written to "go with" products. However, I read The Magic Attic book The Adventure Begins, and found the story and the characters to be very enjoyable, leaving me to want to read more about them and their adventures through the Magic Mirror.

The Ghost of Camp Whispering Pines is also an enjoyable read, with the mystery element unfolding much like a Nancy Drew story does.

It models good writing form, using complex sentence structures and a variety of verbs for ordinary actions, using, for example, perched for sitting, explained and added for said, called out for yelled, mumbled and murmured for said softly, and so on, and so could be used as a writing enrichment tool. On a quick flip back through the book, I really didn't see any use of and and but to begin sentences unless they are enclosed in quotes and a part of spoken English.* It speaks well of the book that I had to take a quick flip back through it to comment on the conventions of written English: I was engrossed in the story.

*Free grammar lesson (related to description of book I provided):

*What am I talking about? Two short sentences may easily be joined by one of the conjunctions, for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, also known by the mnemonic device, "fanboys." Their purpose is to join two equal parts of a sentence, and when they join two equal sentences, they are not capitalized and are preceded by a comma. We could make the case that these words should never be seen capitalized, just to make it easy.

Why mention the conventions of written English?

Students have increasingly been subjected to sophisticated high-stakes grade-level testing and learn correct form initially by having it introduced in the classroom, and thereafter by seeing correct form modeled for them on a daily basis.** A number of books written for children books slip into the habit of beginning sentences with conjunctions, as the earliest ones are meant to be read aloud, and the capitalization adds oral emphasis to the functional words (and this is the value of having those words capitalized when they are a part of oral speech in literature, which is why I mentioned it).

When students are repeately exposed to the misuse of these words in written English, they accept it as correct. No big deal, right? Their teachers tell them about it and they do work in their workbooks joining sentences from the first grade on . . . .

It is a good habit that bears repeating, but "there are just so many hours in the school day and so many targets to hit at each level, and they studied it already," right?

**It is a disservice to children enrolled in public schools to expect them to use these properly on the basis of worksheets done for sentence writing when they don't see it being used in their recreational reading; good usage is learned through exposure to it. Exposure makes it easy to intuitively and naturally make the right choice without even thinking about it.

Formal focus on the conjunctions never goes away either: at the Freshman level of college, an essay that does not observe the simplest conventions will land a student in remedial English.

As my experience as an adult ESL and remedial English teacher (as well as an elementary school teacher), I know how important this first fundamental step in sentence structure is for any academic purposes. As such, seeing this basic step misused in print is like nails on a chalkboard to me . . . .