Sentenced 3 – How we use Imitation Exercises at our School

Welcome back. Last time I introduced the idea of imitation exercises and tried to construct a case for the importance of a formalist approach as a strand of an effective writing/composition curriculum.

Without further ado, here is how we use imitation exercises at our school.

We begin by selecting our model sentences from great literature. This is my favourite part because it means that the reading I do for pleasure, Lawrence, Conrad, Woolf, Nicola Barker, Baldwin, Jonathan Meades, Atwood etc. feeds into my teaching. I am taking my cues from the masters of the form itself and because I have never read enough I am always reading and increasing my store of excellent sentences in the process.

The selection process is also guided by the type/form of sentence we want to focus on and their place within our five year writing curriculum. Once you have gathered and assembled an extensive inventory of sentence forms you can distribute them over your five year plan. I will write more about this in a future blog as it may be of interest to those thinking about a model of progression in regard to the teaching of sentences.

For now let’s say I want to focus my Y7 class on the use of writing sentences containing present participle phrases. I access the inventory and find this:

Anticipating that I would try to run, Annie tied me up. – Steven King, Misery

And this rather more complex example with its vivid use of parallel phrasing:

And, stretching out his long, spindle legs, crossing them at the ankles, knitting his fingers, clasping his hands behind his head, Charlie Redmond looks high to consider the vagaries of life that are general. Kevin Barry, Slow Boat to Tangier

Once selected we basically plan a lesson that aims to do the following:

“Take the sentence apart and reverse engineer it. Turn its shape into a dough cutter for your own sentences.” (Moran, 2018)

How this looks:

Students are introduced to the sentence form through the use of dictation. Students give themselves five lives. I read out the sentences and they write them as accurately as they can on scrap paper. Most of the books I have read about sentences stress the importance of reading sentences aloud.

They then take a clean page of their exercise books and, from the board, copy the sentence. We then discuss grammar and they annotate. This is the parsing phase of the lesson. Our KS3 have a dedicated weekly literacy lesson that has a strong grammar focus. This informs the work they do on sentences.

Next students try and replicate the sentence in their own writing. This might be in the form of a modelled, backwards faded writing drill exercise where students create several examples of the target sentence with less and less help from the teacher. Or it might be something with a greater degree of freedom.

 Finally, in successive weeks the sentence becomes incorporated into the weekly composition task as one of the sentence level criteria. The composition, inspired by Chris Curtis and his influential blog about very regular writing tasks, is a weekly routine that all students complete at our school. Like Curtis’ model it involves the teacher setting up an extended writing task, letting the students attempt it in silence with the teacher circulating live marking as s/he goes.

We have aligned our composition tasks with our five year curriculum. For example during the first term of Year 7 compositions reflect the Greek Myths students have been reading in class. We have also been inspired by Mr Pink’s work on allusion and have adapted it by making one of the writing success criteria something like: Include one classical/biblical allusion. This fits neatly alongside the other sentence level criteria which will reflect the sentence forms that have been assigned to the Year group e.g. the aforementioned sentence with a present participle phrase.

The insistence on allusion has been particularly productive. It has meant that a student writing creatively about Jekyll and Hyde in Year 10 might (and they do, often) produce something like: It would be a Sisyphean task to expect Hyde to cease the pursuit of his illicit pleasures. Indeed, other subject teachers have come to us talking about a plague of allusions in their subjects. Thank you Mr Pink.

The system of selection, dictation and imitation outlined above emerged independently at our school some three years ago, or so we thought. However, proving the dictum that there is nothing new in teaching, my subsequent investigations into sentence pedagogies soon revealed that imitation had been an established procedure in schools in the United States in during the Golden Age of the sentence rhetorics. So much for our vaulting originality! Look on my works ye mighty…etc.

The go to instructional text for the imitation approach seemed to have been “Copy and Compose” (1968) by Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester. According to Landon the method it endorsed began with copying instructional sentences and then doing something called “pattern  practice” which Landon describes as “copy a passage, then read a provided analysis of the model’s structure, and finally to compose an imitation.” Sound familiar?

Stanley Fish deserves the final say on the subject of imitation:

“Have command of the repertoire of formal components and then build something out of it, and then do it again and again, until you can do it on demand. And as you work hard to acquire the skill, always keep beside you sentences produced by those who are virtuosi in the art.”  (Fish, 2011)

Next time: Christensen’s Generative Rhetoric and Sentence Expansion