Down from the Haymow: One Hundred Years of Sentence-Combining
1983; National Council of Teachers of English; Volume: 45; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/376845
ISSN2161-8178
Autores Tópico(s)Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
ResumoThis incomplete exercise, which follows the model used in William Strong's textbook, Sentence Combining. A Composing Book (New York: Random House, 1973), probably looks familiar to anyone who has worked with sentence-combining exercises in the past five to ten years. Few composition teachers haven't at least examined one or another of the sentence-combining textbooks such as Strong's, or Frank O'Hare's Sentencecraft (Lexington, Mass.: Ginn [Xerox], 1975), or The Writer's Options by Donald A. Daiker, Andrew Kerek, and Max Morenberg (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). The last decade has been a time of great interest in sentence-combining, as evidenced by the appearance of these and a number of other sentence-combining textbooks. Sentence-combining exercises are now also almost obligatory in the most recent handbooks or general composition texts, and our knowledge of it and its uses is further enlarged by several research studies into its effectiveness and a proliferation of articles arguing for or against or merely explaining sentence-combining in English curricula at all levels. Because sentence-combining has received so much attention in the past few years, it is all too easy to believe that this classroom practice is only as old as its recent popularity. But the example which opens this essay was taken from a text first published in 1906 by Henry Holt: Alfred E. Hitchcock's Composition and Rhetoric (1917 edition). Sentence-combining has in its twentieth-century history fit into at least three different paradigms of grammar instruction-the traditional schoolbook grammar, structural grammar, and transformational grammar. The significant differences in early and current sentence-combining practice are not differences in the exercises themselves but differences in explanations of how and why the exercises work. In order to show just what is and isn't new in
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