Introduction

Harold Keables (1900-82)

LIFE Magazine Teacher of the Year

‘Iolani School, Honolulu 1965-80

South High School, Denver 1935-65  

A Note on the 2021 Revision

The formatting has been changed to facilitate viewing on split-screen tablets and on phones.

To the Student

Writing errors are normal.  They do not mean there is something wrong with you.  An average paper by a bright college-bound senior has about twenty flaws per page that a teacher could mark with rules in The Keables Guide.  Most college-educated adults would not fare much better.  Even your English teachers make mistakes.  They do not expect you to be perfect, and they do not want you to play it safe and avoid new words and constructions.  They want you to learn rules and to become critical readers of your own work.

The Keables Guide is designed for your convenience, to help you become a better writer.  There are several things you should do to make the best use of it:

1. Use the Keables Guide while you are proofreading instead of waiting for your teacher to return your paper.

2. Use it to do corrections.  Take the time to understand the rule and avoid repeating it.

3. Keep a record of your errors.  Download the Manuscript Form template from the MF page, customize it with your name, and start a personal proofreading checklist of rules to remember. 

The effects of errors.  Not all flaws in writing are equal in importance, but all of them involve the primary responsibility of a writer: helping the reader.

1. Some errors make the writer’s meaning unclear.  Suppose you encounter the sentence below:

After Bill spoke with Jim, they agreed to lend me his car.

You do not know whose car they agreed to lend.

2. Errors can disrupt the reader’s concentration:

Once, I arrived here, my problems ended.

Readers must do a double-take to realize that the comma after “Once” does not belong there.

3. Errors like the one below can undermine the reader’s confidence in the writer.

I think both movies is excellent.

You do not doubt the meaning, but you have good reason to doubt the value of the opinion.

4. The most important flaw is hasty writing that reveals careless thinking.

Study time has a lot to do with success, which is why we should have year-round school.

Before you agree to give up your vacations, you would be well justified in asking, “Exactly what is the reason?  What does ‘have to do with’ mean?  How much is ‘a lot’?  How do you define ‘success’?”

Using the codes.  The Keables Guide uses codes to lead you to specific sections.  Upon seeing a code, just click on the Key and find the rule.

If your teacher asks you to write the rules you violated, the Keables Guide lists the most important part of the rule in blue, usually next to the code (except in the Glossary).  However, you will not learn if you just cut and paste rules and guess at corrections; take your time and read the section and understand the rule.  Sometimes you must determine which of several errors you have made.  Sometimes you should write a specific version of a general rule; for the code “Irr” (“use the correct form of irregular verbs”) you may write “‘began’ is the past tense of ‘begin.’”

Supplementary sections (many called “grammar tip,” “extra help” or “exercise”) provide additional information to help you understand concepts.

Your teacher makes mistakes too and will probably write the wrong code on occasion.  If a code seems wrong, ask your teacher.

At the bottom of this page some resources are attached.  If your teacher approves, download them as Word or Google documents for your own use.

To the Teacher

Teachers can download and print the short versions of the rules at the bottom of this page.  In the same place they can find a file called Model Corrections to show one method for using the Keables Guide.

The Keables Guide tries to steer a course between several extremes; the first pair is brevity and thoroughness.  Its primary audience is college-bound students in grades 7-12.  They want simple right-or-wrong rules, but we teachers want them to recognize that language is complex and subtle.  However, if we provide too much information, they will not read it, because they want brevity even more than they want simplicity.

Between the extremes of prescription and description, The Keables Guide leans to the prescriptive side.  Teachers have different responsibilities than lexicographers and linguists.  Our students have a variety of backgrounds in language and reading, and most of them are new to the conventions of formal writing.  Although overemphasis of minor points discourages students, it is irresponsible to leave them unaware of conventions that may influence not just their future professors, but the readers of their college application essays.  Thus the Keables Guide offers suggestions that are merely conventional (such as those pertaining to passive voice and split infinitives) but distinguishes them from rules like subject-verb agreement.  Good teachers will use their knowledge of each student and each writing task to decide whether to point out each flaw.  A teacher who decides to respond to a student’s use of “aggravate,” “hopefully” or “party” has only to write “G” (for the Glossary of Usage).

Another pair of extremes is freedom and boundaries.  Students need both.  If stating absolute rules for punctuation is difficult, it is even harder for the sections on The Essay and Creative Writing.  The rules there are mostly conventions of which many students are unaware, and common traps into which they often fall.

Some of the prejudices of the author of the Keables Guide must have slipped through his filter.  There may be no one in the English-speaking world who has not used some of the expressions listed in the Mall of Clichés.  Language will always change; many expressions that sound barbaric today will be standard usage tomorrow.  Any campaigner for linguistic purity must end up sounding like a Cato giving laws to his little senate.  However, taste will always be an element of language too.  It is less important to inoculate students against a few of our pet peeves than to make them discriminating users of language who think before they adopt every new expression they hear.  If the day ever comes when a teacher laughs a banal expression out of existence, a thousand new ones will flood in to take its place, to fill the deep-seated human need for clichés.

We hope you find the Keables Guide a helpful resource, and we welcome your suggestions.  It is not, alas, the much-dreamed-of Paper Grading Machine; it will not shorten your average grading time from thirty minutes to fifteen, or from ten minutes to five.  However, it may allow you to spend less time repeating elementary lessons and devote more of your grading time to the students’ ideas and style.

We will close with a plea for what may be the teacher’s most important virtue, patience: 

There is a time to be given all things for maturity; and that even your country-husbandman can teach, who to a young plant will not put the pruning knife. . . .  No more would I tell a green writer all his faults, lest I should make him grieve and faint, and at last despair.  For nothing doth more hurt, than to make him so afraid of all things, as he can endeavor nothing.  Therefore youth ought to be instructed betimes, and in the best things: for we hold those longest, we take soonest.  As the scent of a first vessel lasts: and that tinct the wool first receives.  Therefore a master should temper his own powers, and descend to the other’s infirmity.  If you pour a glut of water upon a bottle, it receives little of it; but with a funnel, and by degrees, you shall fill many of them, and spill little of your own; to their capacity they will all receive, and be full.

Ben Jonson, from Timber, or Discoveries (1641)

Harold Keables

by Charles G. Proctor

The Keables Guide is the book Mr. Keables never wrote.  It is one he would love.

Dr. Michael LaGory has taken the writing philosophy and teaching method that Mr. Keables developed and presented it in a format that is easy to use and effective in improving writing.  It is a system that works.

Mr. Keables used this system for the fifteen years he taught at ‘Iolani, from 1965 to 1980.  It is an instructional technique that was a lifetime in the making, evolving from the years Mr. Keables taught in Denver, Colorado, where he was named National Teacher of the Year, to his ‘Iolani years, when he taught creative writing and Advanced Placement English Literature.

The system uses the student’s own writing as a starting point for learning.  Students move from their writing to the principles that govern effective and correct expression.  They learn what they need when they need it in order to improve their own skills as writers.  It is practical, efficient and highly effective.  It gives Iolani teachers a consistent correction system for grades seven through twelve.

The name and legacy of Harold Keables live on in the awards given each spring in his and his wife’s names, in the Keables Chair that annually brings outstanding teachers, scholars and artists to the ‘Iolani campus, and in this book, the Keables Guide.  The methods, standards and genius that made Mr. Keables a great teacher find a new voice in the work of Dr. LaGory.  Thanks to him and the teachers and students who use the Keables Guide, that voice will continue to guide and inspire young readers. 

For more information about Harold Keables and the Keables Chair, visit our site.

Permissions

We have tried conscientiously to use images and explanations that we have permission to use.  Uncited images come mostly from Wikimedia Commons.  If you believe we have misused any material which is your property, please let us know and we will make whatever changes are appropriate.  The Keables Guide is a non-profit educational resource.

Credits

For the 2014 revision of the Keables Guide the author, Michael LaGory, is grateful to the administration of ‘Iolani School, which generously provided resources; to librarians Clarissa Sin and Tennye Kohatsu, who offered technical advice and helped bring the Documentation section up to date; to the ‘Iolani Audiovisual staff, especially Dane Kurihara, Ben Douglass and Kingsley Kalohelani, for producing orientation videos; to Jacqueline Okumura, for technical assistance; to the English department, who provided support and advice; to the ‘Iolani IT staff, and to the students and colleagues who have taught him how to make the Keables Guide more effective.  For the 2021 revision the author is grateful to Michael Fricano for technical assistance.

The Keables Guide originated in 1997 in a print version.  In 2002 the website was started, with the help of Melodie Chu ’02 and Glenn Young.  The original Keables Guide website credited the following people at ‘Iolani School:

Resources

Use the tabs in the upper right-hand corner of each document below to upload it.  In order they are:

1. Keables Corrections template.

2. Model Corrected Essay.

3. Model Keables Corrections.

4. Essay template high school style.

5. Essay template college style.

6. Teachers’ Guide to Codes.

7. Teachers’ Guide to Glossary.

8. Index to Supplements