The Known-New Principle

Dare I say that Chapter 4, "Flexing the Students' Sentence Sense," in Grammar Alive! is my favorite chapter so far? Yes, yes I do. It deals with several of the biggest issues I see in my students' writing: the understanding of sentence boundaries and varying the types of sentences used.

The key to all of this is to start with students' innate knowledge of the sentence. From there, we can start to talk about how to test their sentences for completeness, vary those sentences, and understand how an audience will react to the types of sentences they're reading.

The first golden nugget in this piece is to ask students to use a frame for sentences that they are concerned might be fragments. The frame suggested comes from Rei Noguchi, which is to put the questionable sentence after the phrase, "They refused to believe that..." For example, a student is questioning "Who got sunburned." When put after the frame, it makes no sense: "They refused to believe that who got sunburned." It's clear that "Who got sunburned" is not a sentence, and the students then have something to work with.

The authors also suggest that having student turn potential run-ons into a question helps show where the natural sentence breaks may be. For example, we have the run-on "That cow hasn't been milked, it's ready to go into the barn." This can be turned into a question: "That cow hasn't been milked, is it ready to go into the barn?" From here, we can talk about how one sentence is a statement, and one sentence is a question, so the sentence break is at the comma. (This might be a more useful exercise for non-comma splice run-ons because it's pretty obvious where the sentence break should be in a comma splice.)

It's also useful to discuss the rhetoric of a run-on and fragment, showing that these constructions have specific effects and that there are even situations in which run-ons and fragments are appropriate.

If you'd like to get your students to be more flexible in their sentence construction, there's nothing like good ol' fashioned sentence combining exercises. Studies show that the more exercises along these lines that students do, the more comfortable they get with making decisions about how sentences come together. There's nothing wrong with doing some sentence imitation, either, which can be done more spontaneously.

The Good Stuff: Rhetoric of the Sentence

The Best Part about this chapter talks about subjects and predicates in sentences. Why is it the best? Well, it's opened my eyes to a way to discuss sentences and how they work that I haven't previously thought about.

The idea is to first think about subjects in a piece of writing. Using random examples from literature, magazines, or even their own stuff, we can ask students to look for the subjects in the sentences. The idea is to note how, when a paragraph is cohesive, the subjects are similar. If there is an unconnected subject that shows up, that's probably going to be confusing for the reader.

When considering both the subjects and their predicates, note that usually the subject and other words that come early in the sentence are familiar, while the predicate offers new information (this is the "Known-New Principle" in the title of this post). Also, vital information has the tendency to fall later on in the sentence. These concepts show that as readers, we have basic expectations for sentences, even if we don't conciously think about the constructions. It bears repeating: we generally expect that familiar information will come first in the sentence, and then new information (that's vital) about that familiar subject will come later in that sentence. From there, we can switch things up to have a particular effect. For example, passive voice is traditionally seen as "bad," but it can be used to control the emphasis of ideas within a sentence (and paragraph). The same goes for the "cleft structure" (starting a sentence with "it" that then places stress on a word or phrase that comes later in the sentence, like, "It was midnight before I went to bed.") and the "there-transformation" ("There is nothing I like better in the world than macaroni and cheese.").

The bottom line? Students should be encourage to play with their sentences. Points are made (and delayed!) based on concious choices we make as writers. The key is helping students understand what a typical reader expects from sentences and the effect of straying from that expected sentence construction. That gives a whole lot of power to the writer, and when students may have felt defeated by previous attempts at understanding grammar, they need as much empowerment as they can get.