Janet,

 

In my larger college classes (they aren't developmental writing courses,
although I'm sure some of the students are also in developmental
writing) I'm seeing a very large number of equivalent sentences,
including some with pseudo-passives of intransitive verbs (e.g. "At this
point in the movie, a strange thing is taken place").  That's never the
only kind of pattern, of course; I haven't cross-indexed, but I
associate those odd passives with a high incidence of very odd phrasing
(for want of a better word) - e.g. "In the movie  it goes into various
types of viewpoint such as modest with first person and a majority of
the time consisting of third person."  

 

As someone who is a linguist but not a composition specialist, I confess
I find such writing pedagogically daunting (for want of a better word).
Attention to topic development, and to the relation between topic
development and choice of sentence subject, etc. seems crucial, and many
of those students do seem to have the idea that what marks academic
writing is its murkiness, but I'm starting to suspect *some* of what is
going on may also involve a kind of short-term memory issue. It's not
that poor writers have some kind of organic memory deficit, of course,
but rather that - since the writing process itself is something they
perceive as laborious and potentially "foreign" - they're devoting so
much conscious attention, and thus time, to each phrase that by the time
they get a few words in, it has been long enough that they've dropped
the beginning from storage. Putting a subject-to-be in a prepositional
phrase and then picking it back up as a pronoun ("In the movie, it...")
is a good example of that kind of effect.  When they proofread, the same
thing happens all over again.  Language that would be fully automatic if
they were speaking turns into a memory hog when they're writing (I can
relate to this - I'm sitting in on Arabic courses, and keep losing track
of the grammar  *and* meaning while I'm trying to remember to put the
dots over the right letters, then losing track of the grammar while I
check for meaning, etc. You can't get away with compartmentalizing the
process completely, either). 

 

And here's where I start feeling even more daunted: When I ask them to
work on some area, like subject selection or verb tense, etc., I'm
probably making the memory problem worse. But if I don't ask them to
focus on any of these structural issues, I feel like I'm not doing my
job, since "Go read a good deal of professionally-written nonfiction for
the next three years and write about it" isn't exactly a good homework
assignment. The reading/writing loop makes the process more automatic,
and the more automatic it becomes, the less overload it triggers.

 

I have other students who still have major issues with cohesion, but it
plays out among the sentences, rather than within them, and those
students seem better able to think about passives and topic selection
while reading back over a draft (although I haven't done an actual study
of that - I'm running the risk of confusing anecdotes with data). There
may be a kind of "automaticity threshold" affecting which pedagogies are
effective. Then again, I'm not a comp/rhet specialist, and it's always
easier to come up with theories when one is unencumbered by detailed
knowledge....

 

Sincerely,

 

Bill Spruiell

 

 

 

 

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Castilleja, Janet
Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 7:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: More Sentences

 

Hello

 

I am reading exit essays for the developmental composition classes this
week.  The assignment asks students to read an article, summarize it,
and then write a response to it.  A student wrote the following
sentences:

 

 

"Comparing size portions of food and the size of dishware has a lot to
do with how choices and behaviors are made by people discovered by Mr.
Wansink, the author of the book," Mindless Eating." 

 

"Decisions made by people are like a structural design of choices was
another discovery made by a psychologist."

 

"The way choices are presented to people is a question of making the
right one."

 

These sentences are not too unusual for these classes, and  they occur
much more frequently in their summaries that in their responses..  One
thing that is interesting is that this student seems to have just
discovered the passive, but isn't making effective use of it. It's clear
that students are going through developmental stages in which they are
moving on to both more complicated reading, and writing more complicated
sentences, so I don't necessarily thing the sentences are 'bad,'
although I don't think they are conveying the information in the way the
student intends to convey it.  In fact, in a way, I think these are
'good' sentences because they show the student is experimenting with
more sophisticated writing.  However, I also think that some students
think that what we are really asking them to do is make the sentences as
obscure as possible.  They aren't convinced that more sophisticated
sentences can coexist with clarity.  

 

I am wondering whether you see this as a problem of not knowing how to
place information effectively in a sentence, or is a developmental
problem that will improve with experience?  Should we explicitly teach
emphasis and focus, or should we just make sure they keep writing a lot?


 

What is your take on this?  And does it matter what school of grammar
you adhere too?  Does that change pedagogy?

 

Janet

 

 

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