The academic demands of classroom English require students to think about language structure in ways that they are not used to. Everybody "knows" much English grammar intuitively but the academic rules themselves can be difficult to articulate. This goes for punctuation, too: errors often reflect students' lack of explicit knowledge of grammatical boundaries. Writing teachers, as well, might not know the jargon associated with English syntax, especially if they have not been trained in linguistics or taken a grammar refresher course in a while. Thus, both teacher and student can be working to improve writing without fully understanding why common errors are made, or how to build a systematic approach to avoiding these errors. To help teachers acquire both more overt grammar knowledge themselves and techniques for guiding students to a more deliberate approach to writing, the authors present in this article a workshop for developmental writing teachers. This workshop consists of five exercises that offer participants the vocabulary--a meta-language--with which to instruct students to become more conscious of the parts of a sentence. The resulting benefits can be seen in students' improvement in both the mechanics of written English and grammatical flexibility in their writing.