Dear all,
 
Clearly, there are different tendencies for sentence-opener patterns based on individual genre, writer, style, etc. But having just emerged from a depressing semester of teaching grammar in which all but two students embraced a prescriptivist approach to grammar for their final philosophy on grammar pedagogy, I think simply introducing the idea that sentences vary, sentence openers vary, and that these choices can be connected to audience and purpose is extremely crucial. I realize the point below is only somewhat related to the issue of sentence openers, but I do think there is an important connection: instilling a sense of approaching sentences as textural entities vs. semantic/syntactic/grammatical slots. 
 
When confronted with the first three paragraphs from Obama's Inaugural speech, few of my college-level students could parse the syntactic and grammatical structures; whether or not they could parse this material, only a slightly greater number of students saw the worth in utilizing variations in grammatical structures (we were focusing on verbs, especially aspect and voice) for rhetorical purposes; the majority of those students were public relations majors and creative writing minors, incidentally. I am fully convinced that stylistic issues are related to critical reasoning and serve to provoke--or suppress--critical thinking in the intended audience, and that we should strive to make these ideas and skills accessible to our students, but making such an argument is difficult to do and more than I will attempt in this email.
 
All best,
Natalie

________________________________

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of John Crow
Sent: Thu 5/21/2009 9:17 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sentences beginning with conjunctions


Craig,

I have the same reaction to your carefully chosen excerpts as I did to Don's:  Of course you can find beautifully crafted passages that do not employ sentence openers.  They are not a required element.  If I had a room full of students who could write like Obama's speech writers or Bruce Canton, my job would be finished.  I don't.

Rather than look at isolated passages, why not look at a broad spectrum of writing like Christensen and Ed Schuster did.  Their findings are clear:  25%-33% of the sentences do not begin with the subject noun phrase.  What's wrong with helping our students emulate professional authors--somewhat mechanically at first, perhaps, but expanding the range of options for them to consider as they work on their writing skills?

I don't want to belabor this issue (perhaps belatedly!), so I guess we should, once again, just agree to disagree.

John


On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:55 AM, Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


	John, Bill,
	  I suspect there may very well be different systems of judgement at
	work, but I'm not going to be quick to say that repetition in the
	subject slot contributes toward boredom. I suspect that if we look
	closely at texts that we find lively and interesting, we will find a
	considerable amount of repetition. Here's a passage from Obama's speech
	on race (highly acclaimed) to help make that point. He uses repeated
	openings ("we can", "this time" are the most obvious) in highly
	cohesive ways, reminding us of what all this rich detail adds up to.
	There's a fine harmony between substance and form.
	
	For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds
	division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle
	- as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the
	aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play
	Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them
	from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign
	whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or
	sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a
	Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can
	speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the
	general election regardless of his policies.
	
	
	We can do that.
	
	
	But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking
	about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one.
	And nothing will change.
	
	
	That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come
	together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the
	crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white
	children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American
	children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that
	these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are
	somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they
	are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century
	economy. Not this time.
	
	
	This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are
	filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care;
	who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in
	Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
	
	
	This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a
	decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that
	once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk
	of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is
	not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that
	the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a
	profit.
	
	
	This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed
	who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same
	proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that
	never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we
	want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and
	their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
	
	Craig
	


	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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