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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