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