ENGL 505A

I think Liz has asked some good questions in her post below regarding how we might address sentence-level instruction in the composition classroom, and my immediate response would be not to do it the way Christensen is suggesting.

On p. 249, Christensen states the following:
"In composition courses we do not really teach our captive charges to write better – we merely expect them to. And we do not teach them how to write better because we do not know how to teach them to write better. And so we merely go through the motions. Our courses with their tear-out workbooks and four-pound anthologies are elaborate evasions of the real problem. They permit us to put in our time and do almost anything else we’d rather be doing instead of buckling down to the hard work of making a difference in the student’s understanding and manipulation of language."

I understand Christensen’s desire to move beyond the workbook and perhaps focus a little less on the reading and discussion of literary texts in order to spend more time explicitly preparing students to be better writers (if we’re teaching a composition class rather than a literature class); however, I don’t really see how his approach is any less formulaic than a workbook exercise, and there would still be heavy lifting of the “four-pound anthologies” if our goal was to have students emulate the form of Faulkner, et al., in order to become "better writers".

Furthermore, as Christensen calls his pedagogy a generative rhetoric, I cringe at the idea of using sentence accumulation as an invention strategy. I don’t see much exigency in it for our students as writers, especially since the cumulative sentence-building Christensen is promoting is, perhaps, quite genre or purpose-specific. But you all already know what my suggestion would be for helping students to become better writers, at both the sentence and discourse levels: multiple drafting, with students receiving commentary from their audience (both peers and the instructor) along the way. While the more formulaic, sentence-level stuff such as comma splices and subject/verb agreement (I know this isn’t what Christensen had in mind in terms of sentence-level writing) could be addressed with the class as a whole, using examples from their own texts (rather than de-contextualized grammar drills), I would promote more one-on-one instruction with students, either through written comments and/or conferencing. I believe having students go back into their own texts, prompted by peer or teacher commentary, and having students respond to their colleagues’ work, can help students come to develop a sense of what is effective (as well as ineffective) writing, across different genres and with different purposes for writing in mind.