Beyond the Sentence
I don’t think that anyone reading this would be surprised when I suggest that grammar goes beyond the sentence level, so I’m going to go there with the help of Mina Shaughnessy (even though, yes, the title of this blog would suggest that I should stick with sentences). The reality is that our students struggle not just with fragments and subject/verb agreement and spelling, but they also struggle with getting a piece of writing to form a coherent whole. In this chapter, Shaughnessy talks about the "beyond the sentence" struggles our basic writing students have.
The first difficulty is students being able to make a "point." Sometimes teachers complain that BW students don’t have a "point," but they actually make many points. The problem is that these points are often not expanded on, and the style may not be as academic as is required in Standard English (226).
It’s important to note that "An idea…is not a ‘point’ so much as a branching tree of elaboration and demonstration" (226). Many times the BW doesn’t feel comfortable with "…play[ing] upon the topic, to follow out the implications that lie within statements, or to recover the history of the idea as it is developed in the writer’s mind" (228). In other words, they aren’t used to thinking critically about what it is they want to write about.
Basic writers, when confronted with the request to expand on their ideas, see that as a requirement to add fluff. Often basic writers will resort to the "…substitution of common wisdom in the form of platitudes" and the inappropriate inclusion of their personal experience (230-1). These techniques replace the playing out of ideas that is critical to effective written communication (232). The mark of an advanced writer is the ability to write longer and longer pieces while remembering and always connecting to the original purpose. Basic writing students struggle doing this and can veer from their main point (233).
Ideas can also become disconnected and unorganized in basic writing because the students can have a hard time coming up with an initial idea. The essay that a more advanced writer will create is based on an initial idea that has been processed (or, as I call it, "marinated" upon) before starting to write, while the basic writer will process as they write (234). Note, however, that an essay that may seem disorganized may actually have an organizational pattern that is "derived from non-academic models," such as the sermons that they hear Sundays at church (237).
Most of us have encountered students who write with a high degree of self-disclosure, telling stories about their jail time, drug addiction, or unwanted pregnancies. Sometimes we view this reliance on personalization of style and topic as an interesting rhetorical tool. The problem, however, is that it’s not a tool at all—students rely on personal narrative and a "speaking" tone to their writing because they don’t know how to write in an academic style (239).
To properly respond to writing assignments, students need to first understand that the academic audience has specific expectations. "The writer is…expected to make ‘new’ or arguable statements and then develop a case for them…far enough to meet his audience’s criteria for fullness and sound reasoning. The beginning writer is…not prepared to meet these expectations, but his awareness of them helps him make sense out of the conventions that govern academic discourse" (240). Two basic conventions that are important to academic writing (and that basic writers struggle with) are to be able to move between concretions and abstractions and to be able to show the organizational relationships between sentences and paragraphs in an essay (240).
In terms of creating an awareness of moving from the general to the specific, Shaughnessy suggests teaching students about "governing" statements by showing them a group of sentences and having them pick out the sentence that would be a more general topic sentence. From there, we could show students slides of pictures, having them come up with topic or thesis statements based on those pictures (for example, showing a slide of couples: "Old couples sometimes look more like brother and sister than man and wife") (246). From here, students can start mining their own experience for data, and then, to go further, can start looking outside themselves for data (247).
Writers are asked to make the following seven types of statements and develop those statements:
1. This is what happened.
2. This is the look (sound, smell or feel) of something.
3. This is like (or unlike) this.
4. This (may have, probably, certainly) caused this.
5. This is what ought to be done.
6. This is what someone said.
7. This is my opinion (or interpretation) of what someone said (257-269).
Remember, though, that all of these rhetorical modes (narration, cause/effect, etc.) start with the basic organizational structure that is derived from the topic or thesis statement (272). It seems that, above all else, the audience insists on one of these "governing" sentences as the root from which academic writing springs. I like Shaughnessy’s idea of showing pictures and having the students create topic/thesis statements based on those pictures. It would generate some good discussion among the students and has the added benefit of stimulating those students who are visual learners.
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