I'm sorry that I'm a week or so behind in my listserv reading and that I
might be bringing up an old point now, but I'd like to take issue with a
comment that Edith Wollin made on Jan 11:

> I think that it is important to note
>that free sentence combining exercises, which do not force the students to
>use a particular syntactic structure, will not improve the students' ability
>to use syntactic structures.  There needs to be repeated use of the
>structure for the brain to pick it up as something that it can use, not just
>in editing, but also, as Johanna says, in composing.

Back in the neolithic 70s, when Don Daiker, Andy Kerek, and I were into
sentence-combining research, we showed that "free sentence combining
exercises" did indeed "improve the students' ability to use syntactic
structures."  Such exercises also improved their ability to write.  You
might check the following article for a quick summary of our finding:

Morenberg, Max, Donald A. Daiker, and Andrew Kerek.  "Sentence Combining at
the College Level: An
            Experimental Study." RTE, 12(1978), 245-56.

We didn't have students simply working out non-directive exercises ("free
exercises"?).  They did the exercises as writing assignments in a
composition class.  And we discussed their exercises every day in class, as
you would discuss any student output in a composition class.  We dittoed
(Good grief! Do remember those purple monstrosities?) the exercises of two
or three students every day, looking at the different ways that students
worked out the "free exercises."  Of course, we talked about paragraph
development and coherence and other rhetorical issues as well as sentence
structure.  Within that rhetorical context, we encouraged students to try
new kinds of structures, nonrestrictive modifiers of various
sorts-participial phrases, absolutes, appositive nouns and adjectives.
And, of course, we encouraged them to use more such constructions in their
own writing.  They did.  And they became better writers, as well as more
fluent with syntax.

I guess my point is that sentence combining as simply an exercise in
grammar or fluency, even if it worked, wouldn't be very interesting to the
profession.  It's only in a composition setting that it has meaning for
English teachers.

What I've never understood is why the process school generally ignored
textual matters, even those pedagogies that worked to improve writing, like
sentence combining.  The process school  licensed  teachers to throw out
bad grammar handbooks and bad grammar teaching in general.  That was
certainly a positive move.  And they certainly improved the teaching of
writing in many ways.  But they threw out the baby with the bathwater, I
think, licensing English teachers to avoid any instruction in textual
matters.

Oh, well.  I don't want to get on a hobby horse here.  I didn't mean to
rail against process pedagogy.  For the most part, I agree with what the
process school advocates.  I really just wanted to comment on what I
thought was a misstatement about sentence combining.

Thanks for indulging me.

Max Morenberg
Miami University
Oxford, OH