ENGL 505B

My husband is always telling me I have a chip on my shoulder about education; I'm relatively defensive of secondary public education, mostly because as a dual-role academic/teacher I hear both sides critique each other fairly regularly. More specifically, I constantly hear academics complain about the "crappiness" of secondary public education, and as a teacher in that system, I have a tendency to get offended and defensive. Thus, my response to Connors' article should contain no surprises.

As I was reading the first portion of the article, in which Connors explains various rhetorical sentence techniques, I was underlining and taking note of various strategies that seem to have worked well in classrooms (especially secondary classrooms!). I was getting excited about new strategies I could use in my teaching. I was also thinking about a recent lesson with my 106 students -- we spent some time this week breaking down some of their biggest sentence-level problems. We usually focus on the content of their papers more than the format and structure of their sentences, but I had noticed various problems with sentences that could be cleaned up easily with a little old-fashioned grammar examination.

Then came the slams -- the reasons why the sentence has been erased from modern composition/rhetoric instruction. According to Moffett, "an exercise is any piece of writing practiced only in schools" (235). Alright, admittedly, yes... we don't go around doing "exercises" in our free time as academics... unless, of course, you want to count the numerous essays, responses, articles, lessons, and discussions we create as "exercises" in grammatically correct rhetoric (my argument being that these ARE exercises). I also want to know how the individuals who challenge sentence-level instructional exercises suggest we address sentence-level stylistic issues in the classroom, because (as I am sure you would all agree), problems with sentence construction certainly exist among students. I feel I am doing my students a disservice if I do not help them create more effective, mature, fluid sentences, and I struggle to develop ways to do this without engaging them in the scourge of rhetoric, the dreaded "exercise."

As Connors points out, the loss of this sentence-driven instructional theory has "left some curious vacuums in the middle of our teaching" (241). I strongly feel this is true. I worry about my students' abilities to write well academically when academic papers are expected to sound and feel a certain way -- a way their papers do not sound or feel (yet). I worry that they will miss out on many of the concepts I found so useful for my writing when I was studying grammar and the sentence as an undergraduate. But, as Connors also points out, "we all must cut our losses and go on." So I shall.