Wordsmith Craftsman
Wordsmith Craftsman focuses on practical writing—essays, reports, business letters, and more—helping your teen write with clarity, purpose, and confidence. It’s skill-building that translates beyond school and into real life.
Quantity:
Complete Course
Consumable
In a Curriculum Kit
Nonreligious
2026 Twelfth-Grade Curriculum Kit
By high school, many students know writing matters but still aren’t sure how to approach it. Wordsmith Craftsman focuses on practical writing skills that extend beyond school assignments and into everyday communication.
Designed as the final level in the Wordsmith series, this course emphasizes structure, revision, clarity, and writing with purpose rather than simply completing assignments.
Part 1 focuses on practical writing tasks, including notes, outlines, summaries, reports, personal correspondence, and business communication.
Part 2 shifts attention toward the mechanics of stronger writing—paragraph structure, transitions, tone, organization, and developing a clearer voice.
Part 3 moves into essay writing, including descriptive, narrative, expository, and persuasive forms, with an emphasis on building skills that transfer into future coursework.
Throughout the course, students spend significant time evaluating and revising their own work. Revision checklists, proofreading tools, quizzes, and student examples provide structure while encouraging more independent writing habits.
The Teacher Guide includes instructional materials, worksheets, and answer keys, but the course is designed to become increasingly independent, giving teens greater responsibility for scheduling and completing their work. Additional resources include note-taking forms, guidance on logical fallacies and plagiarism, blogging tips, review quizzes, and editing support.
This course typically counts for ¼ high school writing credit.
Whether writing an essay, an email, or a future job application, students leave with stronger habits for organizing thoughts and communicating them more clearly.
How to Use Wordsmith Craftsman
- Start by handing your teen the Teacher Guide. Despite the name, it contains the lessons, worksheets, teaching material, and answer keys all in one place.
- Plan for about four hours each week. Spread that time across several days or use longer blocks—either approach works as long as the schedule stays consistent.
- Work through the course in order. Early lessons focus on practical writing tasks and communication skills before gradually moving into stronger paragraphs, clearer organization, and essay writing.
- Keep a notebook or digital document available for drafts, revisions, and reference notes. Students revisit and refine their work often.
- Encourage him to use the revision checklists rather than skipping straight to the next assignment. Much of the learning happens during editing and rewriting.
- Use the appendix. The additional tools, examples, note-taking forms, plagiarism guidance, and logical fallacy reference become more useful as assignments grow longer.
- Track completed work and grades as you go. By the end, you’ll have documentation for ¼ high school writing credit—and a student who has spent significant time practicing real-world writing.
In the 2026 kits this course earns high school credit:
0.25 credits of Composition III
Language Arts · 12th grade · Classic and Non-Religious kits
Author: Janie B. Cheaney
Publisher: Common Sense Press, 2003
Faith-Based: No
View a sample lesson of Wordsmith Craftsman
View a Lesson Plan for Wordsmith Craftsman
Awards and Endorsements:
2012 Cathy Duffy's 101 Top Picks
PART ONE: WORD GAMES
Nouns as a major "building block" of language; preferring concrete and specific nouns over general ones; proofreading.
Verbs
Verbs as the other "building block"; action and linking verbs; preferring strong action verbs over weak or linking verbs; using verbs to show emotion.
Adverbs
The function of adverbs; preferring strong verbs over weak verb/adverb combinations
Adjectives
The function and variety of adjectives; the difference between descriptive and qualitative adjectives; over-use of adjectives
Prepositions
The function of prepositions: to turn nouns into modifiers; the flexibility of prepositional phrases
Pronouns
How pronouns are used; the pronoun-antecedent connection; avoiding confusion with pronouns
PART TWO: BUILDING STRONGER SENTENCE
Basic Sentence Structure
Subjects and predicates; fragments
Successful Sentence Construction
Common "weak" constructions and how to avoid them (particularly "it has" and "there is"; sentence transformation techniques; preferring active voice over passive
Making Connections
Coordinating conjunctions; subordinating conjunctions; semi-colons
Combinations
Combining sentences through appositives, relative pronouns, relative clauses, participles and participial phrases
PART THREE: NOW WE'RE WRITING!
Exploring Sensory Experience
The importance of the senses in connecting writer and reader; writing sensory poems
Figures of Speech
What similes, metaphors and personifications are; how they are used
Special Places
The use of sensory impressions in describing a place; first steps in revision
Describing a Person
"Framing" a person at a particular time and place; descriptions of strangers and of people you know well
Narrative Writing I - Sequence and Detail
Telling events in order; the use of sensory images and details
Narrative Writing II - Focus
The importance of narrowing thoughts and impressions to a particular event; finding the focus and holding it; the difference between narrative and summary; writing about personal experiences; advanced revision
Dialogue
What dialogue and how it is indicated; using dialogue to indicate character traits, add interest, and move the narrative along; speech tags and when to use them; interviews; radio plays
Point of View
First, second and third person; imagining and including other points of view in personal narratives
Story
The difference between narrative and plot; basic story structure; re-interpreting personal experience as a story; effective opening sentences and paragraphs
Final assignment: incorporating word choice, strong sentence constructions, effective organization, sensory detail, dialogue, focus, and point of view, shape an incident from your life into a short story.
APPENDICES: How to Proofread; How to Revise; Action Verb List; Student examples; Four Review Quizzes
review by Pebblekeeper blog
"Nathan started working in Wordsmith Craftsman this year. I feel that this will be his go-to Language Arts Writing Course for the year – and possibly years to come as this book will guide him through the 12th grade...That was the surprise for me, that it wasn’t set out to be – Do this whole book in one year – but rather, do these parts each year... This is a thumbs up for Petra School!!"
Read the Full Review
review by Eclectic Montage
"Wordsmith Craftsman is focused on the student alone. As a high school student, independence is key; however, I do wish there was an included parent guide for this book as well. The level and depth of material covered would benefit from parental guidance, especially for the weak writer...I could see this text being a good beginning in tenth or maybe eleventh grade; however, to really be prepared for college, your student needs to explore research in more depth in twelfth grade to be fully prepared for collegiate expectations."
Read the Full ReviewFind answers to the most frequently asked questions about this product below:
Wordsmith Craftsman is recommended for grades 10-12.
No.
Wordsmith Craftsman counts as a quarter credit of Composition III on a high school transcript. To turn its grade into a GPA, use our free homeschool GPA calculator: it works out each letter grade from your student's scores, figures the GPA by year and for all of high school, and prints a grade record for the transcript.
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- September 5, 2025
Life skills and college readiness mashup
Green R.
The writing program has been our favorite. It is very self paced, you can linger on one assignment for as long as the child needs and then move on. Very mastery based. The beauty of this wetting curriculum is that it teaches writing skills often overlooked in other programs. Scheduling, reevaluation of your day, writing to people, and then it moves into more traditional writing. It mirrored a lot of what our daughter did in her mandatory college readiness class through running start. And it was so good for our daughter with autism. Highly recommend.
- October 28, 2021
Love it!
Rachel
This book is great and very customizable based on which assignments my daughter is interested in writing about. Gives some great practice for her writing skills.
