John, Craig, et al. Aha - I think I misconstrued your point, and apologies for that. I'd agree that even my most problematic students are perfectly well able to vary sentence beginnings in speech, create vastly complex structures, etc. Somehow, they're not bringing that to bear in the same way when they write, or rather, they're so mistrustful of *all* their instincts that they ignore the good ones along with the bad (and the memory strain doesn't help). Some of the emails I got this semester from students explaining why they needed paper extensions were very well designed (spelling and shorthand aside), I think because the authors weren't thinking about the email as a writing task. A side note: With the second, "aesthetic" judgment system, perceived intentionality is a major factor - most of us are happy with a sentence fragment if we think it's intentional and has a good effect, but we don't like fragments if we have valid reason to suspect the writer isn't in control of them. Repetition may work the same way. If an obviously articulate speaker uses a giant parallel construction with identical openings to each unit, we perceive it as adept usage of classical rhetoric; if a student who otherwise doesn't seem particularly articulate adopts a similar strategy, we attribute it to lack of skill. Bizarrely impenetrable writing from a student is a bad thing, but it may come across as impressive if it's in PMLA. Susan's methodology strikes me as a good example of a strategy to encourage students to gain conscious control of structures. Saying that good writing doesn't require sentence-initial variation doesn't entail that such variation can't be used to create good writing, or that knowing how to use it won't be extremely useful in many situations. Most students are in a stage where they have to prove they can do something before they can be let off the hook for not doing it. There is a danger they'll get stuck in "auto-vary" mode, or use variation without purpose (like my students who were told at some point to use sentence connectors and were given a list - they sometimes pick them randomly). That can be dealt with, though, especially if later exercises look at paragraph-level or even section-level "opening frames." Sincerely, Bill Spruiell From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Crow Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2009 6:07 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Sentences beginning with conjunctions 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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/