This discussion is starting to remind me of Dan LaFontaine movie
trailers:
In a world filled with bad writing, ATEGers leap in to the fray!
On a grammar list on which grammarians cannot agree about sentence
openers, one brave soul counsels reason!
In a world in which students cannot figure out how to write interesting
sentences, English teachers come to the rescue!
LoFontaine explained that he opened trailers that way in order to allow
listeners into the back story as quickly as possible. Maybe this should
be our focus with students. How do we help them make their writing
accessible to their audience? Knowing that many good writers use
sentence openers and many do not isn't that helpful. It's more about
how sentence openers or the lack thereof assist the skilled writer in
conveying meaning in a coherent way.
Janet
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Don Stewart
Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2009 7:22 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sentences beginning with conjunctions
Friends,
Here is a link to a web site where you can read and download Francis
Christensen's essay "Sentence Openers."
http://sites.google.com/site/donstewarts/Home
Don
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 9:17 AM, John Crow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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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>
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--
Don Stewart
Write for College
______________________
Keeper of the memory and method
of Dr. Francis Christensen
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