An exercise I've talked about before on this list also addresses the known-new contract. Take a simple affirmative active declarative sentence with a transitive verb and a direct object, and offer it to the class in three forms: the active, the passive, and the agentless passive. Then have the students, in small groups, write a story using on of the sentences they've been assigned as the final sentence of the story. You can introduce this with discussion of known-new and afterwards you can discuss with them what grammatical and content decisions they had to make to meet the known-new demands of their sentence and story. I've used the sentence, "The hunter shot the bull," and its variants.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Hancock, Craig G [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 9:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Teaching known-new contract
Scott,
The absolute key to this is the recognition that a sentence is not a “complete thought” and that sentences need to work in harmony with other sentences. As Wayne C. Boothe writes in The Rhetorical Stance “the diagramming of a sentence, regardless of the grammatical system, can be a live subject , as soon as one asks not simply “How is this sentence constructed,” but rather “Why is it put together in this way?”” You can’t begin to answer that question unless you place the sentence within a rhetorical context and thus within an evolving text. If the sentences don’t work together toward a common purpose (essentially the thread that continues), the writing suffers, and it suffers in ways that are very typical of student writing.
If we look at effective writing, on the other hand, you can see immediately how the effectiveness happens because sentence level decisions are being made in service to the text. The overlap of meaning, quite often an overt repetition of words and structures, is palpable and clear. Students benefit from noticing that. For student writing, especially on early drafts, I often put slashes between sentences where I see an abrupt topic shift—essentially a new start, if you will—and this is usually a startling revelation to the writer because there are so many of them. If you have sixty-four sentences about a topic, they shouldn’t say sixty-four things. Quite often, students believe that they should. They have trouble developing a topic because they run out of new things to say. The effects of this kind of intervention are often immediate because you are reorienting students to the nature of the task.
One reason why the study of formal grammar doesn’t carry over to writing is that it takes the sentence as an isolated entity. Of course, it doesn’t carry over, not if you don’t take that knowledge and apply it to real world decisions in the construction of text. Those studies are purported to say that teaching grammar doesn’t help writing, but they do so by conflating all possible grammar instruction with formal or prescriptive approaches.
Craig
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott Woods
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 1:49 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Teaching known-new contract
Dear List,
Do any of you have experience teaching the known-new contract? What has worked well?
I just introduced the contract to my students today, then had them analyze their own papers for known-new organization. All of them noted that their papers did not conform to the requirements of the contract.
Thanks,
Scott Woods
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