Erasure of the Sentence

Erasure of the Sentence (Connors, 2000)

• ·         Francis Christiansen (1960’s) “You could be a good writer if you could learn to write a good sentence.”  Advocated combining a base sentence with modifying clauses and phrases
• ·         Imitation: an ancient technique has a renaissance in the 1960’s. Proponents believed that the emulation of well formed sentences would develop syntactic maturity.
• ·         Sentence combining (HUGE in the 1970’s): combining sentences using embedding, deletion, subordination or coordination. Based on Chomsky’s theories of generative grammar.
• ·         All these techniques lost influence despite the fact that all three of them had empirical evidence that using them would improve students’ syntactic maturity
• ·         Sentence counterforces:
• o   Anti-formalism: any pedagogy based only on form was suspect; sentence level work was lacking meaning, motivation, purpose
• o   Anti-automatism or anti-behaviorism: any techniques that tapped into non-conscious behaviors were demeaning to students.  These techniques had no theory and were destructive to the individuality of the students.
• o   Anti-empiricism: critics were uncomfortable with the scientific nature of these sentence level techniques; especially, these techniques did not address the cultural or community aspects of writing
• ·         Connors states that despite all these criticisms, no one actually showed that these techniques did not work or were not useful.
• ·         So why did we stop investigating these methods?  Connors says that composition became more and more a sub field of English and literature, and followed the directions that discipline took.