Dr. Robert Royar English 3000-01 9 February 1988 The application of sentence combining as a diagnostic writing tool Abstract: Sentence combining developed in the early 1970s and has often been shown to improve students' writing at many grade levels. But one area of sentence combining research is less well investigated-the use of sentence combining exercises as diagnostic tools and, more specifically, the diagnostic use of unstructured combining applied to personal writing. This paper describes a series of assignments in a college basic writing course which led to the discovery that the students in this class were averse to revising their writing once it had been drafted. Researchers have found that sentence combining exercises can help writers develop more mature and more correct sentence style in their own writing (Mellon; O'Hare). They have discovered that the effects of teaching sentence combining are greater than the effects seen when students are given explicit grammar instruction without sentence combining (O"Hare). O'Hare suggests that one benefit of sentence combining is that it encourages teachers to help students build confidence in their writing. O"Hare argues confident students try new forms which lead to their discovering new content. When students lack confidence in their own writing abilities, they are less likely to revise. In fact, one researcher has discovered that student writers do not revise because they are afraid of risking the loss of what they have already produced (Ruszkiewicz). Sentence combining exercises would seem to be a useful method for helping students over this fear of revision because they allow the writer to isolate passages of a text and to experiment with them. Therefore, I decided to investigate the use of sentence combining exercises on the revision practices of a group of college level basic writers. Using their own writing and that of others, the students in an English Fundamentals (1000) class combined sentences to enhance rhetorical arrangement. Each student wrote an essay about his or her own learning style. In preparation for this they wrote short drafts of essays about their writing experiences. In those essays, which were written in class, they described their own writing processes and the particular writing situation. Their second assignment explored a skill they had mastered and described different stages in their learning process. The different writing assignments the students completed were . a completed draft of the essay about writing, . lists of ideas for the essay about a skill they have learned, . paragraphs about skills they have learned, . a sentence combining exercise, using the "Aluminum" passage devised by Hunt (1970), and . revision paragraphs they created from their original assignments using sentence combining. In this research project I investigate the effects of one type of sentence combining exercise on the writers' ability to develop mature sentence structure and on their ability to discern and create logical sections (i.e. paragraphs) in a finished draft. The different types of writing exercises the students had completed were designed to offer them texts at various levels of development. Some of their writing was in a near final form while other writing was less polished and, supposedly, more readily adaptable to sentence combining exercises. The following lesson plan focuses only on the sentence combining exercises and the application of the exercises to the immediate goal of teaching paragraphing skills: Day 1 I gave the preliminary aluminum passage with only the instructions it contained (see below), Directions: Read the passage all the way through. You will notice that the sentences are short and choppy. Study the passage, and then rewrite it in a better way. You many combine sentences, change the order of words, and omit words that are repeated too many times. But try not to leave out any of the information. Aluminum is a metal. It is abundant. It has many uses. It comes from Bauxite. Bauxite is an ore. Bauxite looks like clay. Bauxite contains aluminum. It contains several other substances. Workmen extract these other substances from the bauxite. They grind the bauxite. They put it in tanks. Pressure is in the tanks. The other substances form a mass. They remove the mass. The use filters. A liquid remains. They put it through several other processes. It finally yields a chemical. The chemical is powdery. It is white. The chemical is alumina. It is a mixture. It contains aluminum. It contains oxygen. Workmen separate the aluminum from the oxygen. They use electricity. They finally produce a metal. The metal is light. It has a luster. The luster is bright. The luster is silvery. This metal comes in many forms (quoted in Weaver). Day 2 I returned to the aluminum passage and asked the students to combine the first 'n' kernels into a sentence. The steps we took were 1. They combined sentences one and two, then the first three. This process continued until they combined the first seven sentences into one sentence. They produced more than one version of that sentence. One writer used adjectivization to combine the sentences in almost every case. Another created relative clauses in most instances. Most used coordinate conjunctions. 2. They read through the aluminum passage again and divided it into sections based on what they considered to be the writer's main ideas. Once again they produced more than one version of the sectioning. Some students' sections were similar to others, and some students' sections were entirely unique. 3. We discussed the reasons for choosing the section patterns that were chosen and why alternate choices may or may not have worked as well. 4. They were assigned to choose a passage from one of the essays or paragraphs they had written, to section it, and to combine the sentences in it so that each section becomes one sentence. Day 3 The students read their own passages, and I discovered that while they could combine short kernel sentences into new paragraphs, they had difficulty taking their own paragraphs, deconstructing them, and reconstructing them into new paragraphs. I decided that I should analyze what they produced in the exercise from two perspectives: their understanding of sentence combining techniques and the intended meaning of the texts they produced. From class discussion and individual conferences I discovered 1. most writers were afraid to write longer sentences because they believed those sentences contained more errors than shorter sentence; 2. many writers did not actually know the uses or meanings of certain subordinate connecting words, and, therefore, they wrote only sentences combined with coordinate conjunctions or sentences which produced comma splices and run-ons (hence the belief that longer sentences were more error prone); 3. some writers believed that once a sentence had been written, it was "set in stone" and could not be improved, so the rearrangement and revision portion of the exercise had no purpose or meaning to these writers; 4. none of the writers had chosen to combine sentences based on their lists of ideas for the skills paper; instead, they all used paragraphs from their essays and made only minor adjustments to these. Day 4 I met with each student individually and read her writing. I examined the individual paragraphs each had written and his list of ideas. At this point I was hoping to find sections that we could deconstruct into kernel sentences. Few of the sentences the student had written contained dependent clauses. Based on the earlier discoveries and on this finding I have decided to devise a plan to help these basic writers learn how to use dependent clauses in their sentences. Conclusion The students in the English Fundamentals course had difficulties completing the sentence combining assignments as given. There are a number of possible reasons for this inability. 1. They may have misunderstood the assignment. 2. They may have not seen a clear purpose to the assignment. 3. They may have been afraid to change what they had already written or believed there was no reason to improve it. 4. They many have believed the interim nature of the assignment and the fact of its not being graded meant that it was unnecessary. 5. They may have had difficulty with the essay assignment and could see no connection between it and the sentence combining exercise. 6. They may have lacked the grammatical sophistication to produce complex sentences with embedded clauses. 7. They may have been unable to conceive of a rhetorical context for the sentence combining assignments. Most of these explanations have problems. Not all of the students misunderstood the assignment. A number of them followed the instructions to the letter while others did not. It is possible that many of the writers could not see any reason for rewriting the sentences into new forms and that this seeming lack of purpose caused difficulty. Yet they did not seem to have similar difficulties completing the final essay assignment which had a similar purpose. While most of the students could not answer questions about grammatical forms such as subordinate clauses or relative pronouns, most of them used these in their own writing at some point, and research has called into question the efficacy of teaching grammatical terms in a writing course. Ruszkiewicz's argument has some validity in this situation. The students seemed to be afraid of risk to the revision. That fear and the absence of a clear rhetorical context for the sentence combining made the assignment appear useless and unnecessary to most of the students. This simple classroom activity points to the same conclusion that Weaver drew about classroom grammar instruction. Only a small percentage of students, those who believe everything they are told to do in a class is important, succeeded. The other students were unsuccessful and unable even to complete the assignment. Even though the sample is small and the method is not scientific, we can still use the results to help plan the next step. Future sentence combining assignments should include clear rhetorical contexts for the students to use in their revision. One possible approach would be to have the students imagine different audiences for the different versions of their sentences. Perhaps that would lead to their realizing that revision can, in fact, serve a useful purpose. Works Cited Mellon, John C.. _Transformational Sentence Combining: A Method for_ _Enhancing the Development of Syntactic Fluency in English Composition_. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1969. O'Hare, Frank. _Sentence Combining: Improving Student Writing without_ _Formal_ _Grammar Instruction_. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1973. Ruszkiewicz, John J. "Revision and Ristk." _In Revising: New Essays for_ _Teachers of_ _Writing. Ed. Ronald A. Sudol_. Urbana: NCTE, 1982. 144-8. Weaver, Constance. _Grammar for Teachers: Perspectives and Definitions_. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1979.[pic][pic][pic]