It is partly the story of a teacher hitting a plateau in mid-career, deeply frustrated by the flatness of his students’ writing, particularly as they struggled with more academic tasks. But it also tells the story of important but neglected research in sentence instruction, which Brandt revives, reinventing his instruction by explicitly teaching the of sentences. In , he identifies three “pillars” of sentence instruction: To help his students understand these concepts, Brandt invents his own terms—the Dime- Dropper, Smack-Talker, ingBomb, Sentence Wannabe, and the Not/But—to describe key moves a writer can make, illustrating them with both student and professional examples. The book is also filled with practical exercises in sentence manipulation that can be used directly in your classroom or modified for your students. At long last, sentence instruction that can really help young writers— their teachers.