Express Yourself!

Express Yourself! is a compilation of writing exercises the author has developed as part of teaching materials used during her first year of teaching English Literacy to the first-year students of the Faculty of Policy Studies at Nanzan University, Aichi, Japan. Recognizing the students need to have a better grasp of the basics in writing (i.e., combination of words to form phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into a paragraph, and later, into a multiparagraph essay), the author decided to focus on organization and logical flow while limiting grammar instructions to recall boxes whenever the need arises.

The choice of topics, about themselves, is firstly for motivation purposes (easy-to-write topics) and as an effort to encourage students to know better or affirm who they were. The choice of characters of different nationalities is an attempt aimed at giving students a glimpse of differences in cultures.

Express Yourself! provides the basic learners a step-by-step training in writing descriptive and narrative paragraphs. The book also encourages and offers ample opportunities to higher-than-basic-level students to apply what theyve learned and express their creativity by completing the optional free-writing exercise at the end of each chapter.