Foundation of Sentence Composing
Imitation as Pedagogy
Children learn grammar, including varied sentence structure, by reading good books, picking up literary sentence patterns subconsciously through imitation–—the same way they learn to speak.
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One purpose of writing is the making of texts, very much the way one might make a chair or a cake. One way to learn how to make anything is to have a model, either for duplication or for triggering one’s own ideas.
–Miles Myers, former director,
National Council of Teachers of English
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The hallmark of the sentence-composing approach is the integration of grammar, writing, and literature through repeated, varied, and systematic practice using only authors’ sentences as models for manipulation and imitation.
The Difference Between Spoken and Written Sentences
Students often write sentences the way they speak sentences, unaware of the difference in conversational syntax and compositional syntax. In her classic book “Errors and Expectations,” Mina P. O’Shaughnessy describes the problem: “Students impose the conditions of speech upon writing.”
Through abundant and exclusive use of hundreds of model sentences by authors, the sentence-composing approach demonstrates how well-written sentences differ from conversational sentences–in short, how good writing differs from speech.
Imitating Model Sentences
Within each student is an inborn capacity to learn by imitating others–in talking or walking, in choosing clothes or grooming hair, in hitting a tennis ball or throwing a baseball, and in composing sentences. Imitating model sentences by authors is the foundation of the sentence-composing approach to building better sentences. Through imitation, students learn to build sentences like J. K. Rowling, Maya Angelou, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Jhumpa Lahiri, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan–or any author.
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Stylistic imitation is a perfectly honorable way to get started as a writer–and impossible to avoid, really.
Some sort of imitation marks each new stage of a writer’s development.
–Stephen King, On Writing
Whenever we read a sentence and like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; and it goes with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.
–Mark Twain
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Like a building rising brick by brick, writing unfolds one sentence at a time. The quality of sentences largely determines the quality of writing. The goal of the sentence-composing approach is to provide activities to help students build better sentences. It achieves that goal through students imitating model sentences by authors and subsequently replicating in their own writing the grammatical structures those sentences contain.
Grammar Through Imitating
In the practices in all sentence-composing worktexts, grammar is always secondary to writing. Making grammar front- and- center is a mistake, leading to paralysis from over-analysis. To illustrate why a strict grammatical description is undesirable, consider the following unfortunate scenario. Suppose you want students to imitate this model sentence:
Model Sentence:
On stormy nights, when the tide was out, the Bay of Fougere, fifty feet below the house, resembled an immense black pit, from which arose mutterings and sighs as if the sands down there had been alive and complaining.
–Joseph Conrad, “The Idiots”
However, instead of showing students Conrad’s sentence, you provide a dauntingly complex grammatical description of Conrad’s sentence, and then ask students to write a sentence matching that description.
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ASSIGNMENT: Write one sentence having all of the grammatical structures described below.
Begin with an adverbial prepositional phrase, followed by an adverbial clause. Immediately after the clause, include the grammatical subject of the sentence’s sole independent clause, modified by a brief adjectival prepositional phrase, which, in turn, should be followed by a nonrestrictive adverbial prepositional phrase. Continue your sentence by using a verb and a direct object to complete the sole independent clause and to illustrate this basic sentence pattern: S-V-DO. Next, add dependent clauses, one embedded within the other. Make the first of the two dependent clauses–—that is, the “umbrella clause”–—adjectival, being sure to invert its basic sentence pattern and to compound its subject. Within your inverted adjectival dependent clause, include another dependent clause, this time, however, an adverbial. Finish by putting a period at the end.
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UGH! Obviously, from that stifling grammatical description, no one could ever produce a sentence. Yes, the description of the grammar is accurate, but is it useful for helping students build better sentences? No, because such over-analysis equals deadly paralysis.
Instead, a far better way is this: after teaching students how easy it is to imitate sentences by authors simply show students the model by Conrad and tell them to write a sentence more or less like his. That’’s it. In minutes, students will write sentences virtually identical to the grammatical structures of the model sentence–not knowing but intuiting the technical grammatical structures it contains.
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DIRECTIONS: Write a sentence like this model.
Model Sentence:
On stormy nights, when the tide was out, the Bay of Fougere, fifty feet below the house, resembled an immense black pit, from which arose mutterings and sighs as if the sands down there had been alive and complaining.
During rush-hour traffic, when his nerves were frazzled, Brent Hammond, twenty miles above the speed limit, hit his brakes, from which came sharp peals and leaden grindings as though the metal were alive and hurting.
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From Imitation to Creation
In all of the sentence-composing worktexts, when students imitate models to replicate the syntax of Angelou or Hemingway or Rowling or Steinbeck or Tolkien or Salinger and so many others, they resemble an art student drawing from a Picasso painting to mirror his style, a music student fashioning a piece to reflect Mozart. In any endeavor–artistic or otherwise, in building a skyscraper, or in building a sentence–all imitative processes are akin to creative processes: a model is both an end- point and a starting- point. Something is borrowed from the model, and something is begun from it. Something is retained, and something is originated. In imitating model sentences, students borrow something (structure) and contribute something (content), through a symbiosis of imitation and creation. In summary, imitation is a conduit to originality, a link to creation.
A baby learns to speak sentences by imitating the sentences of people who know how to talk. The baby thereby learns the oral tools of language, and then applies those tools to build speech in unique ways. A student can learn to write sentences by imitating the sentences of authors. The student thereby learns intuitively the structural tools of literary sentences, and then applies those tools to build sentences in unique ways. Providing authors as mentors places students on the shoulders of giants. From that vantage point, their vision of how to build better sentences is amazingly clear.
Imitation is sincerest flattery, yes–but also profound pedagogy. As students work through the practices in this worktext, increasingly they realize the link between imitation, which is the foundation of sentence composing, and creation, which is its goal.
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Imitation allows students to be creative,
to find their own voices
as they imitate certain aspects of other voices.
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Through the practices in this worktext, students assimilate the grammatical tools of professional writers, creating their own “toolbox,” out of which they can develop their own unique style, discovering their own significant voices as writers, but lastingly hearing the whispering of other voices–Harper Lee’s, John Steinbeck’s, Toni Morrison’s, J. K. Rowling’s, Ernest Hemingway’s, William Golding’s, and so many others in the sentence-composing books, voices that help them discover their own. Using the sentence-composing method, students learn to create–through imitation.
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I read my way [as a young boy] through approximately six tons of comic books, progressed to Tom Swift, then moved on to Jack London’s bloodcurdling animal tales. At some point I began to write my own stories.
Imitation preceded creation.
–Stephen King, On Writing