ENGL 505B

In "Erasure of the Sentence," Connors refers to the sentence as an element of composition pedagogy that has almost disappeared from the textbooks. His review of the traditional rhetorical classification of sentences offers the three most important sentence-based rhetorics in order to set up the stage for his discussion in which he attempts to demonstrate the stages and the causes of what he calls "the erasure of the sentence." The main reasons for the erasure of sentence rhetorics, in Connors's view are: anti-formalism, anti-automatism or anti-behaviorism, and anti-empiricism.

Let me start by saying that reading Welch was a lot like riding a roller coaster: slow going at first, but once it started picking up speed, there were enough twists and turns to keep me hanging on, and some steep drop-offs I didn’t expect. Once or twice, I even thought about closing my eyes; I was afraid all the back and forth, between esoteric theories and pedagogic case studies, was gonna cause me to lose my lunch.