It seems like one of the differences of opinion here is what a teacher should do with students who "do not have a mature style," as Susan puts it. Should we give them "training wheels" (aka, "triage" them, give them "bandaids," etc.) to make their writing more presentable in the short term, or should we try to set them on a path towards developing a more mature style in the long run? These goals don't *necessarily* conflict, but do they "sometimes* conflict? And when do they do conflict, which should take priority? I say that they do sometimes conflict, and that when they do, long-term improvement should take priority.
I believe Susan when she says that her young and struggling writers hand in more readable prose when they follow her advice to "change up your sentence starters." But I also agree with Craig that having been trained this way may make it hard for college writers to think in terms of coherence and see the value of repetition. If, as I think, both Susan and Craig are right, then the student's short term gain (i.e., papers that their high school teachers found a little easier and head-thumpingly boring to read) may not have been worth their long-term loss (i.e, greater difficulty in ultimately attaining a mature style).
Easy for me to say. As a college teacher, I have smaller class sizes and fewer classes than Susan, and, by and large, I probably read fewer of those head-thumpingly boring papers. (Was that "good" repetition or "bad," by the way?)But college teachers, too, face tradeoffs between immediate improvement of a paper and long-term improvement of a writer. For example, I've had plenty of students--often but not always English Language Learners--who can write simple sentence clearly but get very tangled up when they start combining clauses. I'm sure none of us would encourage students like that to only write in simple sentences. We put up with reading convoluted sentences so that students can practice, and eventually improve at, coordination and subordination.
"Vary sentences starters," I rush to admit, is not nearly such bad advice as "only use simple sentences" would be! The similarity, in my mind, is that neither piece of advice acts as a scaffold to help eventually students reach "mature" levels of rhetorical awareness and control.
At least I'm probably getting Susan and John to agree; they're probably both thinking that I'm being too abstract and talking about what should be, not what is! So I'll say how I might respond to the student who wrote the "Landon says Jamie..." paragraph:
"[Student], when I read this, I feel like each thought is separate from the next, and there's nothing to show me how they connect, which is more important than the other, which depends on which. One of the ways that writers fix that kind of problem for their readers is by combining sentences. Before next class, can you try a few different ways of combining those seven sentences into three to five sentences, and tell me which way you like best and why? If you take another look at that "sentence combining" chapter we read, that will make this easier."
The results would be less predictible then if I just told the student to very sentence starters, but at least I'd be asking the student to realize that he or she has stylistic choices to make and to think about the effects of those choices on readers. And consistently asking students to do that can make a difference over the long one.
But Susan, I defer to you as an expert on pre-college writers, and I'm curious; how might the passage's author respond to this kind of advice?
Brian
Brian O'Sullivan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Director of the Writing Center
St. Mary’s College of Maryland
Montgomery Hall 50
18952 E. Fisher Rd.
St. Mary’s City, Maryland
20686
240-895-4242
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Susan van Druten
Sent: Tue 5/26/2009 8:56 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sentences beginning with conjunctions
John, you have actually made my point.
You say you would "work with this writer to subordinate, coordinate, and complementize/relativize clauses and perhaps to consider more carefully the semantic weight/information packaging of verb choice."
If I said what you just said to my students, they would look at me like I was trying to be condescending. So, of course, I don't say that. Instead I just use plain-speak and ask them to change up their sentence starts.
Is the student "likely [to] produce confusing sentences (unnecessarily complex structures) out of a belief that that is what teachers want"? No. I am there in the high school classroom. They do not create twisted syntax. Instead they fix the core problem.
I have expertise in this area. I have adjusted my lofty ideas to reflect what works with my struggling student writers. You can keep trying to justify what you think should work, but it conflicts with what I have experienced.
On May 26, 2009, at 6:48 PM, John Dews-Alexander wrote:
I would not encourage this student to vary sentence openers as there is no problem with the sentence openers. The writer clearly has a focused topic in mind that will carry forward as given information throughout the paragraph (if that is not an appropriate topic for that length of time, then that is the problem, not the structure).
I would work with this writer to subordinate, coordinate, and complementize/relativize clauses and perhaps to consider more carefully the semantic weight/information packaging of verb choice.
Focusing on sentence opener variation here would seem (to me) quite a distraction from the real problems that indicate the maturity of the writing. The writer would not improve the core problems and would likely produce confusing sentences (unnecessarily complex structures) out of a belief that that is what teachers want.
John Alexander
Austin, Texas
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Susan van Druten <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Craig, you are ignoring my concern when you continue to bring up Frost, Obama, and Silko. We agree that purposeful repetition is the mark of a mature style. You should now drop that out of your argument. In fact you should have dropped that on after May 18th when I acknowledged and refuted your point. I said, "When I cover parallel structure in AP and honors classes, we talk about the difference between purposeful repetition (emphasis, humor, known-new, hooks, etc.) and repetition born by uninspired, lazy writing."
I am teaching students who do not have a mature style. I went to school today to find you an example. Do you or do you not agree that the writer below could use some advice on changing up her sentence starts?
Landon says Jamie is "lighter than the leaves of a tree that had fallen in autumn." He is comparing Jamie's weight to leaves falling. He has really started to notice it that she has become so sick that she has lost a lot of weight. He had to support her because she could barely hold herself up. He is not only realizing just her change in weight. He sees how much her leukemia has taken over her whole body and in such a short period of time. He realizes that she doesn't have that much longer.
On May 26, 2009, at 7:47 AM, Craig Hancock wrote:
Susan,
I believe our teaching practices should be based on a solid
understanding of how language works. If we tell students that varying
sentence openings (using something other than the subject as opening)is
a goal of good writing, then we should find a high number of those
variations in excellent writing. The truth is that we don't.
As an explanation for your motivation, you mentioned that students
sometimes keep the same subject for as much as five sentences in a
row. Again, I tried to point out that good writers do this quite
often. I mentioned Frost's "Acquainted with the Night", which starts
every sentence with "I have", copied in the opening to Leslie Silko's
much anthologized "Yellow Woman" to show that the great majority of
the sentences started with "I", many of them consecutively, and copied
a passage from Obama's heralded speech on race to show how he
effectively repeats the same subject or same subject opening for long
stretches of text. I don't mean to imply that you are dealing with
mature writers, but starting sentences with the subject and repeating
sentence openers can be thought of as the mark of a mature style.
There are good reasons for this. If you look at information flow in a
text (given/new), given is almost always first and new is almost always
last. The most important function of a sentence opener (usually the
subject for good writers) is not variation, but continuity. The opening
establishes connection with what went before. One obvious way to
accomplish that is to repeat openings. Good writers exploit repetition
for these purposes. Inexperienced writers tend to move on much too
quickly.
The one place we agree, I think, is that a number of different
structures can act as the subject of a sentence and students should
have those available as resources. I believe they should be used for
continuity, though, not for variation.
I think we have gotten confused from time to time about what kind of
variation we are talking about. A variation of subject is one. A
variation of the kinds of structures that can act as subject is
another. A variation of the kinds of structures that open sentences is
another.
Christensen's essay seems to me good argument for expecting that most
sentences will start with the subject and that when we have variation
form that (about 25% of the time), those will usually be simple
adverbials.
As a more direct answer to your question, I believe it is harmful to
imply to students that good writers try to vary their sentence
openings. I spend more time with my students trying to get them to see
how good writers use repetition, including a repetition of subjects, to
build coherence into texts.
I'm glad you can understand this as a discussion about good teaching
practices, not a personal criticism.
Craig
Craig, I'm still not clear on where you stand. Do you still believe
it is bad practice for a teacher to show students various ways to
start sentences? Is it harmful to have them try changing up
sentences on a worksheet? (I don't know how you got the idea that I
was requiring them to vary every start in their own essays.)
I enjoy the spirit of the conversation. Just because I thought you
were dismissing my argument and called you on it doesn't mean I am
not enjoying myself.
Susan
On May 24, 2009, at 9:56 AM, Craig Hancock wrote:
Susan,
I believe that mentoring young people on their path toward a mature
literacy is a very difficult process. As teachers, we should all be
constantly examining and refining our practices. We are far, far from
perfect in what we do. That is at least equally true of our profession
as a whole. We need to ask ourselves, over and over again, if what we
are doing is best for the students we are serving. Once you posted to
the list that you ask students to vary their sentence openings to keep
from being boring, that advice became subject to the kind of
conversation we do routinely on this list. It has nothing at all to do
with whether any of us believe you are a nazi or a bad teacher. We
simply need to be able to consider these approaches with an open mind.
I hope you can understand that the spirit of conversation was never
intended to be personal.
That being said, I would ask you to question seriously whether the
"style guide" you are using is at all thoughtful or accurate. It says,
first of all, that students use non-subject openers about 50% of the
time. I wonder if that is based on any kind of scholarly study. The
studies refered to on list recently seem to show that a professional
writer opens with the subject much MORE than that, at an average of
about 75%. The lowest total in Christensen's study was 60%, the
highest
about 90% for acclaimed professional writers. If that is the case,
then
students already vary sentence openings more than mature writers. I
would add that the writers in the study were successful, not boring.
I would recommend a book like Martha Kolln's "Rhetorical
Grammar" as a
more linguistically sound source of advice.
But above all, don't be shy about joining our talk. I apologize if
anything I said made you feel as if you were under attack as a
teacher.
As a profession, we are still a long way from having fully grounded,
effective, widely accepted practices. We need to be respectful of each
other as we work that out, and I apologize again for any failures
on my
part to do that.
Craig
Jean, I give them a handout that can be found in many style guides.
I'm pasting it in. Sorry if some of you thought I was a writing
Nazi, who demanded students never dare repeat the same starting word
in an entire essay. Yikes, I should have experienced lots more
outrage, tar, and feathers!
Sentence Beginnings
Vary the beginnings of your sentences.
Most writers begin about half their sentences with the subject-far
more than the number of sentences begun in any other way. But
overuse of the subject-first beginnings results in monotonous
writing. Below are several ways to vary the beginnings of your
sentences.
WORDS
Two adjectives: Angry and proud, Alice resolved to
fight back.
An adverb: Suddenly a hissing and clattering came
from the heights around us.
A connecting word: For students who have just survived the
brutal college-entrance marathon, this competitive atmosphere is all
too familiar. But others, accustomed to being stars in high school,
find themselves feeling lost in a crowd of overachievers.
An interrupting adverb: A healthy body, however, is just as
important as a healthy mind.
A series of words: Light, water, temperature, minerals-
these affect the health of plants.
PHRASES
A connecting phrase: If the Soviet care and feeding of
athletes at times looks enviable, it is far from perfect. For one
thing, it can be ruthless.
A prepositional phrase: Out of necessity they stitched all of
their secret fears and lingering childhood nightmares into this
existence.
An infinitive: To be really successful, you will
have to be trilingual: fluent in English, Spanish, and computer.
A gerund: Maintaining a daily exercise program
is essential.
A participle: Looking out of the window high over
the state of Kansas, we see a pattern of a single farmhouse
surrounded by fields, followed by another single homestead surrounded
by fields.
An appositive: A place of refuge, the Mission provides
food and shelter for Springfield's homeless.
An absolute: His fur bristling, the cat went on the
attack.
CLAUSES
An adverbial clause: When you first start writing-and I think
it's true for a lot of beginning writers-you're scared to death that
if you don't get that sentence right that minute it's never going to
show up again.
An adjective clause: The freshman, who was not a joiner of
organizations, found herself unanimously elected president of a group
of animal lovers.
A noun clause: Why earthquakes occur is a questions to
ask a geologist.
On May 22, 2009, at 11:05 AM, Jean Waldman wrote:
Susan,
This is the first time you mentioned that you teach the students
HOW to vary their sentences. I was under the impression that you
just demand that they do it and grade them on whether they do it.
What method do you use to teach the different possible variations?
Jean Waldman
----- Original Message ----- From: "Susan van Druten"
<[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2009 7:21 PM
Subject: Re: Sentences beginning with conjunctions
Craig, I just don't understand your logic. You were asked to
evaluate two passages that contained the same content. The first
had
boring sentence starts and the second had variation. You admitted
the second had "more flexibility" but then concluded that it doesn't
make it better and went on to speak for Ed that he couldn't possibly
believe the varying sentence starts made it better.
That struck me as arrogantly dismissive.
Do you have any proof that teaching students how to vary their
sentence starts compromises their ability to write with coherence?
It seems like such a stretch Varying a sentence start doesn't
force
students to vary the subject. If varying sentence starts doesn't
lead to incoherence, would you change your stance? Or do you have
other concerns as well.
Susan
On May 20, 2009, at 9:55 PM, Craig Hancock wrote:
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.
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and
select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface
at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface
at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
|
