ENGL 505B

Christensen writes, "I cannot conceive any useful transactions between teacher and students unless they have in common a language for talking in sentences" (251). As the focus of high school writing courses moves further and further away from grammar and mechanics, rare is the first year university student who is completely comfortable using such grammatical terms as 'modifier', 'relative clause' and 'subordinate clause'. And, as someone who has taught undergraduate linguistics courses, getting them up to date is no small task.

I'm not sure devoting two classes or more to the teaching of grammatical lingo is the best use of my time as a composition instructor (and, hey, I LIKE grammar). Also, like Cris before me, I believe that teaching them a strategy for generating a specific type of complex sentence is needlessly formulaic. While I agree with Christensen that style is something many students need but few teachers know how to address, I'm more interested in getting students to develop a style of their own. This, I think, can be accomplished by having students analyze their writing and finding patterns in their sentence structure. The best prescription is not many long sentences (I shudder at the thought), but a vareity of sentences ranging from short, medium to long.