Janet,

 

In my larger college classes (they aren’t developmental writing courses, although I’m sure some of the students are also in developmental writing) I’m seeing a very large number of equivalent sentences, including some with pseudo-passives of intransitive verbs (e.g. “At this point in the movie, a strange thing is taken place”).  That’s never the only kind of pattern, of course; I haven’t cross-indexed, but I associate those odd passives with a high incidence of very odd phrasing (for want of a better word) – e.g. “In the movie  it goes into various types of viewpoint such as modest with first person and a majority of the time consisting of third person.”  

 

As someone who is a linguist but not a composition specialist, I confess I find such writing pedagogically daunting (for want of a better word).  Attention to topic development, and to the relation between topic development and choice of sentence subject, etc. seems crucial, and many of those students do seem to have the idea that what marks academic writing is its murkiness, but I’m starting to suspect *some* of what is going on may also involve a kind of short-term memory issue. It’s not that poor writers have some kind of organic memory deficit, of course, but rather that – since the writing process itself is something they perceive as laborious and potentially “foreign” – they’re devoting so much conscious attention, and thus time, to each phrase that by the time they get a few words in, it has been long enough that they’ve dropped the beginning from storage. Putting a subject-to-be in a prepositional phrase and then picking it back up as a pronoun (“In the movie, it…”) is a good example of that kind of effect.  When they proofread, the same thing happens all over again.  Language that would be fully automatic if they were speaking turns into a memory hog when they’re writing (I can relate to this – I’m sitting in on Arabic courses, and keep losing track of the grammar  *and* meaning while I’m trying to remember to put the dots over the right letters, then losing track of the grammar while I check for meaning, etc. You can’t get away with compartmentalizing the process completely, either).

 

And here’s where I start feeling even more daunted: When I ask them to work on some area, like subject selection or verb tense, etc., I’m probably making the memory problem worse. But if I don’t ask them to focus on any of these structural issues, I feel like I’m not doing my job, since “Go read a good deal of professionally-written nonfiction for the next three years and write about it” isn’t exactly a good homework assignment. The reading/writing loop makes the process more automatic, and the more automatic it becomes, the less overload it triggers.

 

I have other students who still have major issues with cohesion, but it plays out among the sentences, rather than within them, and those students seem better able to think about passives and topic selection while reading back over a draft (although I haven’t done an actual study of that – I’m running the risk of confusing anecdotes with data). There may be a kind of “automaticity threshold” affecting which pedagogies are effective. Then again, I’m not a comp/rhet specialist, and it’s always easier to come up with theories when one is unencumbered by detailed knowledge….

 

Sincerely,

 

Bill Spruiell

 

 

 

 

 

Hello

 

I am reading exit essays for the developmental composition classes this week.  The assignment asks students to read an article, summarize it, and then write a response to it.  A student wrote the following sentences:

 

 

“Comparing size portions of food and the size of dishware has a lot to do with how choices and behaviors are made by people discovered by Mr. Wansink, the author of the book,” Mindless Eating.”

 

“Decisions made by people are like a structural design of choices was another discovery made by a psychologist.”

 

“The way choices are presented to people is a question of making the right one.”

 

These sentences are not too unusual for these classes, and  they occur much more frequently in their summaries that in their responses..  One thing that is interesting is that this student seems to have just discovered the passive, but isn’t making effective use of it. It’s clear that students are going through developmental stages in which they are moving on to both more complicated reading, and writing more complicated sentences, so I don’t necessarily thing the sentences are ‘bad,’ although I don’t think they are conveying the information in the way the student intends to convey it.  In fact, in a way, I think these are ‘good’ sentences because they show the student is experimenting with more sophisticated writing.  However, I also think that some students think that what we are really asking them to do is make the sentences as obscure as possible.  They aren’t convinced that more sophisticated sentences can coexist with clarity. 

 

I am wondering whether you see this as a problem of not knowing how to place information effectively in a sentence, or is a developmental problem that will improve with experience?  Should we explicitly teach emphasis and focus, or should we just make sure they keep writing a lot? 

 

What is your take on this?  And does it matter what school of grammar you adhere too?  Does that change pedagogy?

 

Janet

 

 

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