Physical fitness experts recommend that, for cardiovascular health, a person should build up to a program of twenty-five minutes of vigorous exercise four times a week. Unfortunately for busy people, however, absolutely no physical benefits are gained from performing twenty-five minutes of vigorous exercise just once a week. In fact, vigorous exercise performed just once a week can precipitate a heart attack. A little bit of a useful activity is not necessarily a little useful.

Burying a few useful writing exercises among piles of useless ones, as is done in numerous English textbooks, is not an effective pedagogy for building writing skills. Many English texts use the shotgun approach to program design. Publishers make sure to include a few exercises of virtually every type found in all other textbooks and programs so that whatever approach a teacher favors, their textbook salesman can show where that approach is "covered" in their text.

The shotgun method promises to be of at least some benefit by blasting a student with everything that could possibly hit the mark of improving skills. However, the charging bull elephant of illiteracy requires more than a shotgun. Students need many hours of "time on task" with powerful illiteracy fighters such as sentence combining.

We recently reviewed a newly published edition of a popular high school English text to see how much SC it includes. SC is squeezed into the grammar section of the text, which spans pages 282-405. Among these 123 pages, 6 pages are on SC, 23 on diagraming sentences, and the rest are on grammatical terminology with accompanying exercises. A teacher using such a text might feel he or she is giving his or her students SC training. But there is not enough of it. A truck runs no better with one wheel than with no wheels -- it needs all four. Textbooks which have one wheel of SC and the other three wheels of grammar, process instruction, and literature surveys -- with a spare tire of WAC -- will not carry students through the toll gates of writing examinations and on to their destinations of careers in a technological world requiring full-powered communication skills.

Pack ratting is a related flaw of many textbooks to be avoided. The pack-rat syndrome is the compulsion to keep at least a small sample of old things even after new ones have been developed to replace them -- a commendable attitude for historical societies but not textbook authors. Leafing through many English textbooks is, in effect, taking a historical tour of teaching materials for a century or more. Mid-19th century modes of discourse are jostled by 1970s freewriting, expressive writing, and journals. Diagramming and the parts of speech are timewarped around SC. Communication chapters involving speaking and listening skills coexist with business writing and college application forms. Traditional research papers inhabit a chapter or more while students are also exposed briefly to techniques for writing ancient Japanese poetry, short stories, one-act plays, TV scripts, and modern commercials.