The disappearing sentence

Here are some notes

Christensen rhetoric: traditional theories of the sentence that were being taught were taxonomic rather than generative or productive.

Imitation exercises were intended to make students’ writing similar to that of a superior writer; students in imitation groups learned to write better expository prose with fewer flaws than students using sentence-combining pedagogies.

But students taught Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar both reduced their errors and developed the ability to write more complex sentences

Hunt concluded that the minimal terminable unit, a unit minimal in length and terminated graphically between a capital and period, was a much more reliable index of stylistic maturity

Frank O’Hare’s study in 1973 showed beyond a doubt that sentence-combining exercises, without any grammar instruction at all, could achieve important gains in syntactic maturity for students.

Anti-formalism—the idea that nay pedagogy based in form rather than content was automatically suspect

Johnson refuted that students need training in higher-level skills such as invention and organization rather than knowing how to be a “sentence acrobat”; suggests that Christensen is useful in a classroom but little elsewhere

Imitation writing was perceived as insulting; it was “mere servile copying” and insulting to the student writers’ creativity. It was mechanized and dehumanizing.

Sentence combining was nothing more than an exercise; it barred students from saying what they really wanted to say

The gradual but inevitable hardening of disciplinary forms erased the sentence. Composition studies became a subfield of English studies