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
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