Sentenced 2 – The Importance of a Formalist Approach.

Welcome to Part 2. If I am destined to be the only reader of this, then please can I heartily welcome myself back to the blog!

Last time I sketched out the rationale behind why we have placed a deliberate focus on the teaching of sentences in our English department. Now I would like to try and account for our insistence on adopting a formalist approach.

How were you taught to teach writing? Were you taught how to teach writing? What did your teachers teach you? Were you advised to teach students “useful” forms of sentences and paragraph structures? Does a formalist approach merely foment “dead” formulaic writing, writing that is in thrall to an exam board mark scheme? Or can certain forms, if taught effectively, actually liberate the developing writer?

I think that these are important questions. Here is Brooks Landon from his brilliant book “Building Great Sentences” (2008):

“Too many poorly trained writing teachers simply accept the most recent received ideas, and too many of our standards and/or “rules” for effective writing are little more than received ideas dating from a particular period of time or from a particular critical idiosyncrasy that have been uncritically passed along from teacher to student.” (Landon, 2008)

I was very fortunate to receive my initial teacher training in Hertfordshire. The team of advisors are, and still are, excellent. (Hello Liz!) I do not consider myself a “poorly trained” teacher by any standard. But regarding the teaching of writing some of what Landon says rings true. His comment on “received ideas” still hits home. Why, at the start of my career, did I place so much emphasis on sentence openers? What about the much maligned reign of PEE in analytical writing which did indeed bestride my world like a colossus in those early years?

Much of my early teaching of writing was a mere parroting of received ideas. To clumsily paraphrase Melville the speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a newly qualified teacher into the profession left little time for reflection, received ideas about writing were swallowed hook line and sinker. After a few years they stuck.

And there were more…

What about the grammar centred advice on simple, compound and complex sentences? E.g. You can improve your writing by adding more complex sentences. Was such advice helpful? Were the sentence grammar terms (used in this way) helpful? Here’s Landon again, evoking Christensen and making an assertion that will need some clarification later on (especially because grammar does have a key part to play in the teaching of sentences):

Christensen indicated that both the grammatical and rhetorical classifications of sentences are equally barren in the amount of real assistance they give to students. (Landon, 2008)

Indeed, I think Landon is referring to the truism that a grammatically simple sentence may be semantically/conceptually more complex than a sentence that is grammatically complex! Think perhaps of a writer like Beckett (maybe even some Kafka and Borges) and you can catch a glimpse of this:

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” (Beckett)

Two grammatically simple sentences. Two conceptually complex sentences.

Christensen brings this idea home stating:

“School grammars would call a sentence by Hemingway a simple sentence.” (Christensen)

So what was the way out of this? How could my beginner writing instruction be liberated from ineffective received approaches? In the last blog I alluded to a Golden Age of sentence rhetorics in the United States running roughly from the end of the 1960s up to 1980. These approaches were unashamedly formalist in approach. There were three that dominated. They were:

Imitation exercises

Sentence combination exercises

Sentence expansion exercises based on Christensen’s generative rhetoric

The rest of this blog entry will focus on imitation exercises and attempt to rehabilitate a formalist approach.

Imitation is a formalist approach par excellence. Here are some excellent writers and thinkers defending formalism:

Without form content cannot emerge. (Fish, 2011)

Form, form, form, and only form is the road to what the classical theorists called “invention”, the art of coming up with something to say. (Fish, 2011)

“…by “forms” I do not mean parts of speech or any other bit of abstract machinery. I mean structures of logic and rhetoric within which and by means of which meanings – lots of them- can be generated.” (Fish, 2011)

 “Forms are the engines of creativity.” (Fish, 2011)

So what do imitation exercises entail? For as Landon says, those that adopt such exercises trust “the value of imitation as the basis for rather than the opposite of creativity.” (Landon, 2008)

Both Moran and Fish make an explicit link between imitation exercises and traditional writing pedagogies based on the teaching of classical rhetoric. Indeed, Moran with customary eloquence states that Shakespeare himself may have developed his syntactic virtuosity by internalising:

“The way of classical rhetoric: learn how a good sentence sounds and mimic it. That is how Shakespeare learned to write at grammar school – rote learning the art of verbal ornament, getting to know words as sounds and shapes before they calcified into meaning.” (Moran, 2018)

Does this argument hold? Is it a reductive way of accounting for Shakespeare’s magical facility with language? How about two supposedly different writers from the last century? How about P.G Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler? Both went to Dulwich School. Both were taught “the way of classical rhetoric”, the way of imitation. Here are some moments from Jan Piggot’s “Wodehouse’s School Days”:

Chandler…left an absolutely first-rate record of positions and prizes in Classical forms.

Wodehouse on the classics “It was the best form of education I could have had as a writer.” Wodehouse was also awarded a Senior Classical scholarship. Wodehouse was taught by Philip Hope a first class classicist from King’s, Cambridge.

Ok, all very interesting but on the level of each writer’s literary syntax can we discern the impact of being taught in this classically formalist manner? Are there any similarities? Remember: we are not focusing on content for what could be more removed than the two very different social milieus explored by these writers! We are focusing on syntax. Take a look at the examples below:

The sunlight poured into the small morning-room of Chuffnel Hall. It played upon me, sitting at a convenient table; on Jeeves, hovering in the background; on the skeletons of four kippered herrings; on a coffee pot; and on an empty toast rack. 

P.G. Wodehouse, Thank you Jeeves (1934)

And here’s Chandler:

In the silence time passed. It passed in the dry whir of the electric clock on the mantel, in the far off toot of an auto horn on Aster Drive, in the hornet drone of a plane over the foothills across the canyon, in the sudden lurch and growl of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake (1943)

Did you notice the similarities in the syntax? Both writers establish two very different atmospheres using very similar syntactic forms. Both begin with a simple sentence which is then followed by an extended cumulative sentence that inventories details using a pattern of repeated prepositional phrases.

Is this evidence of the idea that syntactic forms are themselves conceptually neutral? The idea that once mastered, once secured they become the vessel for whatever content is needed in that particular moment of literary world building?

The next blog will outline how we teach syntax using imitation at our school.