A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or
more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two
months apart.
All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons
are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have
to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until
the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each
lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such,
we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.
The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final
exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work,
including the final exam.
Week One
Wednesday - Lesson 01
In this first lesson, you'll start by meeting your instructor and getting comfortable in your new online classroom. Then you'll reacquaint yourself with parts of speech. You might have heard about pronouns and conjunctions or prepositions and interjections, but do you have any idea what these things are? What is an adverb, anyway? You'll find out in this lesson as you begin to organize a bunch of words into a complete sentence.
Friday - Lesson 02
It’s time to learn about some tricky words that often get confused because they sound alike. In this lesson, you'll begin to spot mix-ups such as have/of, lie/lay, and there/their. This will pave the way to learning which is the right word for the sentence you want to write.
Week Two
Wednesday - Lesson 03
In this lesson, you'll master the mighty apostrophe, a tiny punctuation mark that has a big job to do. We'll look at how it's used to combine words and express ownership. Building on what you know about mix-ups, you'll find out when and where the apostrophe belongs, and why it sometimes doesn't.
Friday - Lesson 04
Every sentence needs a subject and a predicate, so it's important to know what they are and how to find them. In this lesson, you'll learn what is and isn't a subject and a predicate, and you'll master the basics of sentence structure.
Week Three
Wednesday - Lesson 05
Get ready to master sentence fragments. In this lesson, you'll see how bits and pieces can masquerade as a whole. You'll learn to recognize when a collection of words doesn't quite measure up to a real sentence. Then you'll be able to attach those words to their missing part or find a way to rewrite them so that they can stand up on their own.
Friday - Lesson 06
Some of us just like to keep going and going and going. In this lesson, you'll learn how to stop. You'll learn a variety of ways to keep one independent clause from running into another and give your readers a chance to catch their breath.
Week Four
Wednesday - Lesson 07
It's time to make sure you're the boss of your verbs. You'll see how the concepts of yesterday, today, and tomorrow can change a verb. Once you know your past, present, and future, you'll take a look at some other ideas that shape verbs, such as person, number, voice, and mood.
Friday - Lesson 08
Some of them are small in size, like we and I, but as a group, they're large in number. Get ready to put you and me and he and she and this and that (and lots more) under a microscope. You'll learn about the different kinds of pronouns and how some of them change depending on what they're doing in a sentence.
Week Five
Wednesday - Lesson 09
It's time to take the argument out of your grammar. In this lesson, you'll apply what you've learned about subjects, verbs, and pronouns and find out how to make them all agree with one another. The result will be grammatical harmony.
Friday - Lesson 10
In this lesson, you'll learn how to stay on the straight and narrow grammatical path. You'll begin to recognize inconsistencies. And you'll see how to create a steady narrative system by choosing a person, a time, and a structural method to organize your words, phrases, and clauses.
Week Six
Wednesday - Lesson 11
Everything you've learned in the course so far has been leading to this lesson. Now you're ready to ensure your writing says what you want it to say. You'll learn how to express yourself in the appropriate language, with no wasted words. And you'll use logic to inspire your own good grammar.
Friday - Lesson 12
Every piece of written work, great or small, needs its i's dotted. In our final lesson, you'll spend some time refreshing your memory on those long-forgotten rules of capitalization. At last, you'll distinguish between colons and semicolons, and parentheses and dashes. But we won't say goodbye until you're equipped with an editing checklist to keep in your back pocket.