I tried to post this earlier — think it may have gone onto another board.
Sentence Combining is an older program I saw about fifteen years ago when one junior high student had the workbook. At first I thought it looked overly simplistic, but as I thought about it, it made more and more sense. The idea is that most students tend to write simple clunky declarative sentences. The program teaches writing more interesting and varied structures by teaching methods of combining ideas with conjunctions, subordination, etc. I suspect that this would also feed back to better understanding of more complex forms in reading.
Anybody know about it?