Several Short Sentences About Writing is a slim book that reads more like a long meditation than a textbook, which is part of what makes it useful in a college composition course. Verlyn Klinkenborg, who taught writing at Harvard and other universities, wrote it to unsettle the habits that students bring from school. Professors who adopt it need to decide how it will connect to graded work, because a book of ideas does not change student writing unless the assignments ask for it. Thoughtful syllabus design makes that connection.

A practical way to begin is to assign the book in short pieces rather than all at once. Because its pages are sparse and its sentences are deliberately brief, students can read a section in ten minutes and still have plenty to discuss. Professors might pair each reading with a one-paragraph response that applies the idea to a student's own draft. This turns the reading into a practice instead of a topic of conversation.

The book's tone can unsettle students who have been rewarded for formulaic essays, so professors should expect some resistance in the first few weeks. Some students will worry that writing in short, plain sentences will cost them points in other classes. It helps to address that directly by explaining that the goal is control, not simplicity for its own sake, and that clear sentences serve complex arguments better than inflated ones.

Building Assignments Around Sentence Attention

Assignments in a book-anchored course should reward noticing as much as producing. A sentence audit, for example, asks students to take a page of their own previous writing and mark every sentence that is padded, vague, or built on stock phrases. They then rewrite the page and explain their choices in a short reflection. The reflection is where the learning shows, because it requires students to articulate why one version is stronger.

• A sentence audit of a previously graded essay, with a rewritten version and a short reflection.
• A reading response that applies one idea from the book to a current draft.
• A revision portfolio that includes two drafts of the same paragraph and a margin commentary.
• A peer workshop where partners read drafts aloud and mark where attention drifted.
• A final essay on a topic of the student's choice, evaluated with a rubric focused on sentence craft.

Assessment That Matches the Course Philosophy

If the course teaches students to attend to individual sentences, grading should do the same. A rubric that weights argument at seventy percent and style at ten percent sends the opposite signal. Many professors in sentence-focused courses give roughly equal weight to ideas, structure, and sentence craft, and they grade revision effort separately from the final product. That balance tells students that how they write is part of what they are writing.

Grading also needs to respect the fact that students begin at very different points. A student who arrives writing eighty-word sentences and ends the term writing controlled forty-word ones has grown more than a student who was already competent and stayed the same. Portfolio assessment captures that growth better than a single end-of-term essay. It lets professors reward progress while still holding the line on final standards.

Managing the Workload of Close Reading

Sentence-level feedback is time-consuming, and a professor with sixty or ninety students cannot annotate every line of every draft. A manageable approach is to comment closely on one paragraph per paper and give a brief summary note about patterns elsewhere. Students quickly learn that the commented paragraph is a model for how to read the rest. This keeps the feedback focused and prevents the exhaustion that produces rushed comments late in the stack.

Some programs also use AI-assisted tools to produce a first pass of rubric-aligned comments, which instructors then review and adjust. The value is not in replacing the professor's judgment but in recovering hours that can go toward conferences and in-class workshops. When graders in a multi-section course use the same rubric language, students in different sections also receive more consistent expectations.

Adapting the Approach for Different Student Populations

The book's ideas are accessible, but they land differently depending on the class. Multilingual writers may find the emphasis on short, plain sentences a welcome relief, or they may worry that it conflicts with the more elaborate style they were taught elsewhere. Students in honors sections may push back on the idea that complexity is overrated. Professors can use those reactions as discussion material rather than treating them as obstacles.

Whatever the population, the course works best when students write often and in small amounts. Short, frequent assignments give professors many chances to give feedback and give students many chances to try the habits the book describes. By the end of a semester, the difference is usually visible in the sentences themselves, which is the most convincing evidence a composition course can offer.