ENGL 505A

And by that, I don't mean their names. I mean what's in the name of the class that we teach and what difference does it make. Do we teach Composition, Composition and Rhetoric, Rhetoric, Grammar, Linguistics, Writing.... and so on. When I read Connors, I couldn't help but agree that somehow it does feel as though we've lost sight of the basic units of writing like the sentence and have been theoretically privileging attitudes (as he calls them) that trickle down from the English dept. But, I was left wondering at the end of Connors how to go about teaching a sentence level Composition lesson or two. Enter Christensen. And what an entrance. "We don't teach our students to write better, we expect them to." I'm paraphrasing, but only barely. I was like, wow, what a claim... and I couldn't say that I disagreed. But... Then came the specifics. All Christensen's "good" sentences come from Literature. Problem 1, for me. Problem 2, they're mostly Modernist sentences. Problem 3, can you really take a mathematical approach to teaching a good sentence? Add 1 Noun Cluster, a couple of Adjective Clusters, A Verb Cluster or Prepositional Phrase and Bam! You've got a good sentence. What? Huh? How did this discussion get high jacked by Literature and formulaic writing? Can we really teach this stuff and expect our students to give a shit? It's fascinating from a linguistic analysis of literature point of view, but, and this returns to my issue, what are we teaching? Composition is different from acontextual sentence level grammar, is different from Rhetoric, is different from....