Sentenced

Welcome to a series of blogs on teaching sentences. I am going to share with you some of the approaches we are using in our English department at Les Quennevais School in Jersey.

At the very least I hope you will find something of interest.

We have been inspired by the work of others and, as often as I can, I will give those others credit where credit is due.

There will therefore be lots of direct quotes from books on sentences/syntax/sentence rhetorics that have informed our approach. This is because the people who wrote them are far better writers than I am. So they too will be given the credit they deserve. I am but a conduit for their mightier intellects.

Let’s begin.

Why focus on sentences?

We have been rebuilding our department and English curriculum over the last five years. Our curriculum is divided into three interleaved areas: Language, Literature and Composition.

The latter area means that from the start we have had a focused interest and five year plan for the teaching of writing.

Interestingly the tripartite division into Language, Literature and Composition may seem unorthodox but it is nothing new. Francis Christensen alludes to it in his seminal collection “Notes Towards a New Rhetoric” (1967).

Christensen is a very important figure. There will be more on his resoundingly relevant work later.

Back to our writing curriculum.

We have developed robust strategies for effective vocabulary instruction.

We have been teaching words and wanted an equally robust methodology for the teaching of sentences/syntax. Joe Moran’s recent book “First you Write a Sentence” (2018) alludes to the importance of syntax saying:

“Syntax is what brings the words to life and makes them move.” (Moran)

For the many of us who have read “The Writing Revolution” (Hochman and Wexler, 2017) this insistence on the centrality of the sentence is nothing new. Here they are nailing their colours to the mast:

“Sentences are the foundation for all writing. If students haven’t learned to write a clear, coherent sentence, they’ll never be able to write a clear, coherent paragraph or essay.”

“The Writing Revolution” was a timely reminder of the importance of sentences and, as you will see, it has been incredibly helpful in informing our approach at Les Quennevais.

Interestingly, some of the techniques expounded in the book (I am thinking of sentence combination and sentence expansion in particular) have an illustrious lineage in the history of English teaching and composition studies in the United States. Indeed, in the late sixties and early seventies their primacy went unchallenged. They were the presiding orthodoxy. Then, as Robert J Connors notes in The Erasure of the Sentence they vanished, were “completely elided” and “doomed to marginality”.

The Writing Revolution and in the UK the work of teachers like Mark Millar (who recently delivered a session at the 2019 Team English conference on sentence combination, that I missed alas) has proven that these pedagogies are being eagerly exhumed and enthusiastically reimagined. They are revenants on a journey back towards relevance.

These approaches were also never disproved by research and, according to Connors, significant research was indeed undertaken on them in the 70s. There was even a national conference on sentence combination. (Was it fun I wonder?) This should be music to the ears of those of us currently teaching in our age of research informed practice.

What are the aims of having a deliberate focus on sentences? Two formulations by Christensen are useful here. Our five year plan of sentences and composition aims to teach our students: “syntactic control” and “syntactic fluency.” How similar these two things might be will not be discussed at this point!

A happy side effect of a curriculum with one of its strands focusing on sentences/syntax is that many students become more perceptive critics of prose style. For much of prose style is a product of a writer’s syntax. It is one of the ways in which we can easily differentiate between the prose of say Jane Austen and George Orwell, or Thomas Pynchon and Dan Brown. Stanley Fish in “How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One (2011) applies Donne’s description of the human body as “a little world made cunningly” to the sentence. Learn to write sentence, Fish states and you will improve your capacity to be able to read a sentence.

A working knowledge of syntax has the potential to reveal part of the process of literary world building and at the same time it can assist writers in building literary worlds of their own.

So this is why we teach sentences. Next will be why we adopt a formalist approach to the teaching of sentences before letting students bound away freely into the boundless expanses of “free” writing.