Susan,
I actually had a private email from Ed that said he presented the
revisions as an attempt to show that varying sentence openings wouldn't
save the sentences. That was my response as well.
The intitial point for your exercise as I understood it was not that
students should have varying structures to choose from, but should not
use the same subject in consecutive sentences. (Should vary subjects
from sentence to sentence.) My response was to say that students tend
to change subjects TOO QUICKLY and need to learn to keep a topic in
focus for longer stretches of text. I tried to say that given and new
are necessary (an overlap of meaning) in ALL good writing, and the
normal position for given information is the opening slot.
I wrote about the language games I play with students to show how part
of any sentence (or even the whole sentence) can be pulled down to
become the given in the next sentence. A great deal of flexibility is
required to accomplish that. I am not against flexibility. I do not
believe that varying subjects from sentence to sentence is normally a
good thing. Being ABLE to do it doesn't seem much of an accomplishment.
Janet gave us a passage which varied subjects and was largely
incoherent, somewhat as a result.
I'm surprised that people aren't noticing or pointing out that Obama
uses a repeated adverbial opening ("This time") throughout a paragraph.
I am not advocating that nothing but a noun group should start a
sentence, but that coherence is created by repetition of focus over
larger stretches of text.
The beauty of Obama's passage is not just that he stylistically repeats
"we can", but that he gives us an extended list of all the
dysfunctional things we are currently doing (Set up by "We have a
choice) and then follows that with a whole series of more productive
recommendations for "This time." These repetitions become highly
cohesive devices. They alert the reader to an extended connection. The
speech is nicely organized and nicely developed, and the sentence slot
repetitions help so much in the organization. My grammar students, by
the way, did reasonably well with it.
Nancy Sommers' research in particular seems to show that less
experienced writers revise by improving sentences, more experienced
writers by improving the meanings (the whole text.) For that reason, as
a teacher, I try to shy away from revising sentences apart from their
contribution to the text. The same would be true for vocabulary--a wide
vocabulary is wonderful, but what is needed is the precise word, not
the fanciest one. So for me, it wouldn't seem right to advocate varying
sentence openers for the sole purpose of variety.
I suspect I am a somewhat idiosyncratic teacher. I suppose it might
come across as self-promoting to say that I am very successful at what
I do. I should add that I have done it for a long time and certainly
changed approaches over the years as my understanding deepened. But a
large part of what I do is to focus on how good writers create
coherence (critical reading) and how students can make decisions at the
sentence level based on the larger purposes of the text. And as part of
the "science" of that, I have noticed (I am not the first or the only
one by any means) that good writers tend to repeat subjects MORE than
inexperienced writers.
A sentence is not a complete thought, but a move in a series of related
moves. Sentences need to work in harmony with each other and in harmony
with the unfolding purposes of the text.
This is not a shallow position, and I suspect my passion about it may
make it seem as if I'm dismissive of other views. If that's the case, I
apologize.
Again, I think we should base our teaching on observations about how
language works. If we can find effective texts that vary subjects
radically from sentence to sentence, I'll stand corrected.
Craig
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.
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
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