Here are some resources to help improve writing skills -- and avoid those word crimes:
WriteSource is a K – 12 site offering prompts for writing personal compositions or for journal writing. For each grade, there are also different types of student writing samples, such as personal narratives, expository and descriptive paragraphs, reports and creative writing. At the high school level, you can view samples of different types of essays, responses to literature, and research writing.
Write an Argument Essay: Step-by-step guide.

Scholastic Writing Worksheets: For teaching how to write different types of essays, including narrative and descriptive writing, writing summaries and how-to's, comparison/contrast, and others.
Evan-Moor Daily Paragraph Editing:
Grade 4
Grade 7
Evan-Moor Daily Language Review
Grade 3
Grade 4
Grade 5
Grade 6
Writing Worksheets
Essay Writing Instructions: Download for writing expository, descriptive, argumentative, comparison/contrast, and persuasive essays.
SAS Curriculum Pathways' Writing Navigator Suite of Tools: Leads students through a step-by-step writing process. There's the Writing Planner which helps students to state a purpose, define the audience, and generate and organize ideas. Writing Drafterprovides a framework for developing ideas into a first draft. You build an essay section by section, at the end of which you are prompted to analyze sentences, word usage and transitions. The essay can then be opened in the Writing Reviser, which points out potential problem areas, like cliches or misplaced modifiers. It also presents checklists of questions regarding the structure of your essay, sentence variety and clarity, verb tenses, and other things.
Thesis Creator: Breaks up the thesis statement into diffrerent parts to help you create your own.
Graphic Organizers: These are from Holt, including main idea, drawing conclusions, sequencing, comparison/constrast, and others.
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