Susan,
   I'm sorry if I come across as arrogantly dismissive. I don't mean to
be. I do believe that teaching students to vary sentence openings is
not a good idea, and I have given that a great deal of study and
thought.  I believe that the conventional advice to vary sentence
openings is not based on close observation of how language works in
effective texts. I'm not sure why you would say those points are
irrelevant. Asking students to vary sentence openings may have the
effect of pushing them further away from coherence--at best, a
distraction from more relevant choices.
   Here's a opening passage--chosen in part because I already have it in
an electronic file to copy from--from Leslie Silko's "Yellow woman".
It's a short story, so the sentence openings are more typical of
narrative than of a more expository text, but the sentence openings are
quite unremarkable, almost entirely pronouns. I hope we can base the
discussion on observations of effective writing, not on personal
preferences.

  Yellow Woman    (Leslie Silko)

    My thigh clung to his with dampness, and I watched the sun rising up
through the tamaracks and willows. The small brown water birds came to
the river and hopped across the mud, leaving brown scratches in the
alkali-white crust. They bathed in the river silently. I could hear
the water, almost at our feet where the narrow fast channel bubbled
and washed green ragged moss and fern leaves. I looked at him beside
me, rolled in the red blanket on the white river sand. I cleaned the
sand out of the cracks between my toes, squinting because the sun was
above the willow trees. I looked at him for the last time, sleeping on
the white river sand.
     I felt hungry and followed the river south the way we had come the
night before, following our footprints that were already blurred by
lizard tracks and bug trails. The horses were still lying down, and
the black one whinnied when he saw me but he did not get up—maybe it
was because the corral was made out of thick cedar branches and the
horse had not yet felt the sun like I had. I tried to look beyond the
pale red mesas to the pueblo. I knew it was there, even if I could
not see it, on the sandrock hill above the river, the same river that
moved past me now and had reflected the moon last night.
    The horse felt warm underneath me. He shook his head and pawed the
sand. The bay whinnied and leaned against the gate trying to follow,
and I remembered him asleep inside the red blanket beside the river. I
slid off the horse and tied him close to the other horse, I waked
north with the river again, and the white sand broke loose in
footprints over footprints.
    “Wake up.”
    He moved in the blanket and turned his face to me with his eyes still
closed. I knelt down to touch him.
    “I’m leaving.”
    He smiled now, eyes still closed. “You are coming with me, remember?”
He sat up now with his bare dark chest and belly in the sun.
    “Where?”
    “To my place.”
    “And will I come back?”
     He pulled his pants on. I walked away from him, feeling him behind me
and smelling the willows.
    “Yellow woman,” he said.
    I turned to face him. “Who are you?” I asked.
    He laughed and knelt on the low, sandy bank, washing his face in the
river. “Last night you guessed my name, and you knew why I had come.”
     I stared past him at the shallow moving water and tried to remember
the night, but I could only see the moon in the water and remember
his warmth around me.

 Craig

Craig
I sounded snarky in my last email.  I'm sorry for that.  But you
> really are arrogantly dismissive of something I teach my students as
> a mini-lesson but do not require them to do in their essays.  I have
> seen better writing from them, and it is annoying to have such strong
> evidence be dismissed without much thought.  I do think you have not
> thought this through.
>
> Susan
>
>
> On May 20, 2009, at 7:57 PM, Susan van Druten wrote:
>
>> On May 20, 2009, at 1:09 PM, Craig Hancock wrote:
>>> You can certainly make the judgment that Ed's version shows more
>>> flexibility on the part of the writer, but it doesn't make it a
>>> better essay,
>>
>> Craig, it's clearly better.  You offer no evidence for why it is
>> worse or even equal.  Own up, dude:  It is clearly better, but,
>> yes, it still sucks.  Your tower is showing.
>>
>> The rest of your argument is irrelevant.  You are preaching to the
>> choir.  We do know what makes a good essay.  We know that varying
>> sentence starts is not a panacea.
>>
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>>
>
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