The Following is a text version of a review on The Writing Course and The Essay Course printed in Practical Homeschooling Magazine.

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Spotlight Review of The Writing Course and The Essay Course

By Melissa Worcester

©2007 Home Life, Inc. Originally published in Practical Homeschooling magazine #79 (Nov/Dec 2007), a publication of Home Life, Inc., PO Box 1190, Fenton MO 63026-1190, (800) 346-6322,
http://www.home-school.com. An annual subscription to PHS is $19.95. Used by permission.

Grades 5–12. The Writing Course, $149. The Essay Course, $59.95 if purchased separately, now included with purchase of The Writing Course. Audio CDs along with CD-ROM containing PDF files; printer required to print the workbooks.

The Writing Course Company, TX. (830) 626-6480.

www.advanced-writing-resources.com.

The Writing Course and its companion, The Essay Course, present a simple, natural, common-sense approach to teaching writing unlike anything that I have seen before. Designed for upper elementary through high school, their purpose is to take the fear out of writing.

What are writers, or potential writers, afraid of? The author of this course, homeschooling dad and Christian pastor Fred Lybrand, says beginning writers are afraid of not writing well enough and of making grammar and punctuation mistakes. This is not a course in grammar or punctuation (although the site sales page claims, “once a student learns our method, he’ll never need to look at a punctuation book again...GUARANTEED”). In 21 days, The Writing Course will teach you (the parent) how to give effective feedback that will improve your child’s writing and your child will have had extensive practice in both writing and in applying your feedback, with (hopefully) visible results. The companion Essay Course takes 17 days to teach effective essay construction.

What you get: a nice sturdy plastic CD-wallet-type case containing discs in individual sleeves. The Writing Course comes with five discs, while The Essay Course comes with four discs. One disc from each set is a computer CD that contains instructions. This is more extensive for The Writing Course, also containing a workbook, an answer key for the workbook, a transcript of the lectures, complete step-by-step instructions for teaching the course, a punctuation reference guide (using the course’s unique approach), and some pages containing quotes you can hang on your wall to remind your students of the important concepts they are learning.

The instruction disc for The Essay Course just contains brief instructions and a PDF file containing a sort of outline for writing an essay. All of the documents are in PDF format and a PDF reader is also included in case you need one. The rest of the discs in each course are audio CDs containing the lesson lectures (21 lessons for The Writing Course and 17 for The Essay Course). These are the heart of the courses.

The Writing Course also contains a 46-page workbook, which is used for note-taking and for writing the exercises. You can print as many copies of the workbook as you want: one for Mom as well as for each of the kids; a new one for the kids for the following school year. But wait—why would we need to do it all over again? (That’s what the Lybrands recommend, doing each course again each year or even more often.) “As people grow in their skills,” Fred Lybrand told us, “the material becomes brand new. Since we’re inviting people to tune their ‘writing voice,’ as they grow as a writer, they can apply the principles taught in the courses in a fresh way.”

First, you go through the lectures. Each is less than 30 minutes, some significantly shorter than that. The Writing Course lessons are accompanied by one or two pages in the workbook. The workbook serves as a framework for note-taking (key points are written out but some words are replaced by blanks so that you fill it in as you listen). The Essay Course is geared for older students of high school age and they are encouraged to take notes and do assignments on their own paper. Most lessons also contain a writing exercise; in The Writing Course, there is space in the workbook to write that out and the author tells you to stop the CD while you’re doing the exercise and then continue.

The lectures are given by Fred in his down-home Texas accent, with a short old-fashioned music clip introducing each lesson’s lecture (the music introducing The Essay Course lessons is a bit more modern). They are very easy to hear but not quite professionally recorded—there are some longer-than-normal pauses that make you think you’re out of batteries in your CD player. The Writing Course lectures are mostly done in front of a class; he sometimes calls on people and has to repeat what the participants say because they don’t have a microphone. This less-than-professional style is made up for by the fact that you get to hear the student’ actual writing attempts (the actual writing samples are read out loud by the author so you can hear them clearly, it’s just the participants’ questions and occasional comments that you can’t hear).

The Essay Course lessons do not seem to be recorded in front of a live class, and parts of a few of them are duplicates of some of the first Writing Course lectures, in case you buy only The Essay Course and miss the important gems taught in The Writing Course.

But what do you do when you’re finished with the audio lessons in The Writing Course? That’s when the feedback process comes into play. Students are instructed to write for 30 minutes every day, filling the front and back of one double-spaced sheet of paper. You can keep a notebook for this or use individual sheets of paper. Then the student brings his writing sample to the parent/teacher who corrects it. The course gives specific guidelines for this which are very helpful and different from anything I’ve seen before in other writing courses. The goal is for the student’s writing to improve from applying the principles learned in the lessons (the 12 secrets of writing) and what he learns through the feedback.

The Essay Course builds on this by providing a template for writing essays, loosely similar to the outline format I was taught in high school, but a bit more user-friendly for those who don’t like outlines. Fred encourages students who don’t like formatted writing to stick with it for the purpose of getting a good grade in high school and college. After they graduate they can relax more and write the way they want to write. This is helpful advice for those of us with stubborn students, and it’s good for them to hear it from someone besides their parents.

The author of this program, Fred Lybrand, is a pastor and homeschooling father. He has a college degree in literature, another in Bible, a doctorate from Phoenix Seminary, and is also a published author. The website also provides his wife, Jody’s, credentials: a Masters degree in education. Together they have homeschooled their five children for 19 years. In addition to teaching their own children using this method, Fred has used it to tutor “dozens and dozens” of other students successfully. According to him, effective writing consists of putting thoughts on paper in such a way that people not only understand what you say but also are really glad they read it. He says the way to do this is not to concentrate on grammar and punctuation but just on writing. He uses the analogy of an athlete in the moment of performing a well-executed move; the athlete is in the moment, not thinking of the mechanics of the game. Writing should be like that, not hung up on the mechanics, and this course teaches that kind of writing. It is especially good for those who struggle with writing because of fear of failure.

This product is rather pricey, but that fact is mitigated by a couple of important features. First, keep in mind that you can use it with an unlimited number of students, and re-use it as many times as you need. Second, the author provides one year of coaching support and a one-year satisfaction guarantee.

The biggest drawback of The Writing Course—that it does not teach any particular format of writing—is at least partially addressed by its companion product, The Essay Course. The Essay Course it is specifically designed to prepare students for tests containing essay questions and uses the same no-nonsense approach.

Parents will want to note that The Essay Course is geared for older students. Examples of some suggested topics include whether it is wrong to date someone you do not intend to marry, and also story lines from the Star Wars movies and the Harry Potter books. The author discusses these from a Christian perspective, but if you watch out for such things you will want to be aware of these relatively tame pop culture references.

NOTE: Now that they’ve switched from their old site (thewritingcourse. com) to the new one (advanced-writing-resources.com), you can sign up to receive a free lesson from The Writing Course by email, making it easier than ever to check it out for yourself.