ReMembering the Sentence

Abstract

This article echoes Robert J. Connors's call for a reexamination of sentence pedagogies in composition teaching and offers an explanation of the unsolved mystery of why sentence combining improves student writing, using insights provided by work in contemporary research in linguistics and in language processing. Based the same insights, I argue that we invite words and phrases, the true members of sentences, to important positions in writing classes and describe practical methods for doing so. I deeply appreciated RobertJ. Connors's article "The Erasure of the Sentence" published in College Composition and Communication in fall 2000. It was not only a thoughtful look at sentence-based pedagogies but a clear and muchneeded historical analysis of their curious eclipse. I have always wondered why, pedagogically, acknowledging the importance of writing sentences is so often construed as diminishing the importance of other levels of discourse. While I have taught both graduate and undergraduate U.S. students, most of my work as a composition teacher has been with international students who come through university ESL classes or who come for help writing theses and dissertations. In teaching ESL composition, the devaluation of the sentence as a locus of instruction is particularly surreal. It has been as though "process" somehow precludes the immediate process most central to translating thoughts