Bill,

I think you hit the hit the nail on the head with your "two different kinds
of judgment systems."  Your food analogy is an excellent encapsulation of
the underlying issue.

I also agree with you that most of today's students have limited reading
experience compared to students of past generations.  I probably should have
said that today's students "have been exposed to" many thousands of
sentences instead of "have read."  However, most of these students
(developmental or not) are able to comprehend sentences that contain a
variety of sentence openers (as well as other structures) and, if asked,
they can write similarly structured sentences on topics of their choosing.
In fact, Constance Weaver gives examples of how *first graders* can do a
pretty amazing job of making up their own sentences following the structure
of an example, as demonstrated by her *I Am* poem exercises.

John

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Spruiell, William C <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Dear All:
>
> I'm coming into this conversation late, and so apologize in advance for
> any wheel-reinvention (I've read over the thread, but there's a lot to
> take in!).
>
>
> I suspect this may be a situation in which it's useful to distinguish
> two different kinds of judgment systems that we habitually bring to bear
> on student writing, although the distinction inevitably becomes fuzzy.
> On one hand, there's a kind of practical approach, which lets us
> evaluate writing in terms of its management of information flow for the
> audience. An analogy would be evaluating food on the basis of its
> digestibility and nutritional appropriateness to the group eating it. On
> the other hand, there's a set of customs that have evolved in particular
> genres that enable a more aesthetic approach, allowing judgments of what
> is viewed as "lively" or "artistic" writing (with the food version being
> an evaluation on the basis of taste).
>
> Sentence variety *as* a desideratum is part of the aesthetic judgment
> system. Every language has ways to manage information, and every
> language appears to use given vs. new distinctions as part of that, but
> not every language group places a high value on sentence variation.
> Having an immensely long series of parallel constructions connected by
> 'and' is a perfectly good style in many cultures.
>
> That doesn't mean variation without value, of course, just as no one
> would ignore the way food tastes. But a nutritional definition of "good
> food" is different from a restaurant-review definition, although both
> have merit. One can, as Craig notes, have perfectly good information
> management without major variation in the way sentences in the text
> begin, and in some genres info-management takes precedence over most
> other factors. At the same time, that kind of writing can seem boring
> (although there are so, so many other ways to be boring, as I'm probably
> demonstrating). In short, I think *some* of the disagreement here may
> derive from use of different definitions.
>
> As a side note, I am going to argue a bit with John's assertion that
> "[s]tudents are exposed to tens/hundreds of thousands of well-formed
> sentences as they read literature and professionally written texts from
> other content areas [but] remain oblivious to (and unmoved by) their
> structure." While I realize that even a short novel has a large number
> of sentences in it (except if it's by Faulkner), I've found that many of
> my students, particularly the developmental writers, *haven't* read very
> much at all, or managed to get by with reading tasks that involved
> scanning for specific pieces of information (an activity that can
> frequently be done by attending to noun phrases, rather than whole
> sentences).  They were *assigned* books, but that's a different thing
> entirely. Their reading outside of assignments is confined almost
> entirely to chatrooms and texting (and they do emulate that style
> flawlessly, even in contexts where it's not appropriate). They find
> professional writing foreign, and I suspect Janet's recent example of
> student writing (and a lot of what I read this semester) is the
> student's attempt to produce something equivalently foreign. They
> succeed!
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
>
>

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