ENGL 505B

The last two readings have really spoken to me as I have contemplated, struggled, and internally argued with myself (I'm not crazy, I promise) about how to work with my students on their sentences. I started the semester by encouraging my students to analyze the bigger rhetorical picture. Many of them were SO focused on sentence-level editing instead of paragraph- and paper-level revising that I spent the first many weeks introducing them to the larger units of a paper. Now that I feel they have a handle on what belongs in a paragraph (I've seen stellar improvement in this arena), and I am fairly certain that most of them are thinking more actively in their writing, I am trying to figure out what to do with these relatively butchered sentences. I moved their focus out -- now I want to bring it back -- but without turning our class focus towards grammar (which is not the purpose of 106).

However, the steps I need to take to do this have eluded me. I'm floating in sentence land... and taking my students with me. And I'm worried they're going to float away. I've tried drawing their attention to the main clauses of their sentences, and have found that many of them aren't 100% sure what that even means, so I need to backtrack. From there, I haven't had many ideas, and like I said, I'm trying to make sure I don't shift class focus too heavily. Christensen has shed some light, as has Connors, and while I feel I'm being tugged closer to earth, I'm still partially levitating in sentence land.

So I'm wondering -- where do all of you stand on sentence instruction? Should our students be "sentence acrobats," as Christensen argues, or is Tibbetts correct in arguing that this will create "dexterous rhetorical acrobats who dexterously tell untruths" (232)? Have you done any of this with your 106ers (or others)? And if so, how?