Composition: History & Theory: 2000 - 2009
Connors, Robert. “The Erasure of the Sentence.” (2000)
Description
Connors, Robert J. “The Erasure of the Sentence.” CCC 52.1 (2000): 96-128. JSTOR. Web.
In this article, Connors traces the rise and fall of sentence rhetorics within composition pedagogy. I have tried to summarize the salient events within the history provided by Connors.
Pre-1960s
Since 1890, sentence pedagogy was an important aspect of composition pedagogy. Textbooks would break down sentences by grammatical types—simple, complex, compound, and compound-complex—but they would also classify sentences according to function: declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory. Additionally, exercises would require students to write many sentences.
Christensen Rhetoric (acrobatics)
1963
Francis Christensen publishes “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence.” This required students to start with simple base sentences and then add more and more modifying clauses and phrases (appositives) in order to teach them to write sentences that are generative rather than merely descriptive.
1978
Faigley conducts an experiment to test the pedagogical effectiveness of Christensen’s approach. “Faigley’s experiment showed that the Christensen method does produce measurable results” (100).
Imitation
1963 and 68
Edward P.J. Corbett published the Uses of Classical Rhetoric and Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, promoting a return to imitation as a pedagogical tool. One type of exercise required students to copy passages word for word, and another type asked them to imitate sentence patterns. Many textbooks adopted these exercises.
1977
Rosemary Hake and Joseph Williams conduct an experiment to test imitation. They found that students wrote better prose with fewer errors than those using sentence-combining pedagogies.
Sentence Combining
1983
Shirley Rose publishes “One Hundred Years of Sentence Combining”
1957
Noam Chomskey’s theory of transformational-generative grammar provides a new theoretical basis for sentence combining.
1963
Bateman and Zidonis study the effectiveness of TG grammar and find that students have fewer errors and develop the ability to produce more complex sentence structures.
1964
Kellogg Hunt publishes a study and invents the T – unit.
1973
Frank O’Hare publishes Sentence-combining: Improving Student Writing Without Formal Grammar Instruction. This study finds that teaching sentence-combining without any other grammar instruction could achieve important gains in syntactic maturity.
1978
Daiker, Kerek, and Morenberg’s study shows that sentence-combining is also pedagogically effective for college students.
Between 1976 and 1983, there were no fewer than 49 articles in major journals about sentence-combining and hundreds of papers and conference presentations.
The Downfall of the Sentence
Sentence rhetorics had been criticized for over 15 years, and finally succumb.
Such rhetorics were deemed formalist and atomististic.
1968
James Moffett publishes Teaching the Universe of Discourse, arguing that teachers must “leave the sentence within its broader discursive context” (as qtd. 110). He also criticizes all exercises for stripping away context.
1969
Sabina Thorne Johnson argued that students need to focus on higher level writing skills, such as invention, rather than Christensen’s sentence acrobatics.
1973
Frank D’Angelo, while arguing that imitation is similar to invention, notes that it is often criticized as dehumanizing, uncreative “mere servile copying” (as qtd. 114).
1975
W. Ross Winterowd criticizes sentence acrobatics for removing sentences from the rhetorical situation.
After 1984
General articles on sentence-combining died out, the few that were published tended to focus on ESL.
1983
Donald Murray and Peter Elbow criticize formalist pedagogies at the second Miami sentence combining conference.
Anti-scientism and -empiricism
Late 70s
Susan Wells and Patricia Bizzell accuse empirical methodologies of being asocial.
1983
Michael Holzman publishes “Scientism and Sentence Combining,” claiming that sentence-combining detracts from humanism.
The Social Turn
The field of rhetoric and composition begins to move away from pedagogies that seem to disregard context and ignore the rhetorical situation. Composition is now seen as a socially mediated process.
Conclusion
Connors thinks that we may have been too quick to discount pedagogies whose efficacy has been demonstrated by empirical research. He also questions of the validity of some of the counterarguments against sentence rhetorics.
Author
Jonathan Holmes
Date of Upload
05/31/11