User:Rudi Seitz/Sentence combining

Sentence combining is the process of crafting one sentence that encompasses the meanings of several others. The product is often longer and more syntactically complex than any of the original sentences, though it may be more concise than all of them taken together.

A writer might combine sentences to avoid choppy repetition, to achieve greater stylistic variety, or to more tightly establish the relationships between ideas that had been scattered throughout the original sentences. But if sentence combining can make prose more concise and expressive, it can also make prose more difficult to parse. Some writers might use it to increase the perceived sophistication of an argument, while obscuring the underlying logic.

Though sentence combining, along with other manipulations like splitting and rearranging, is a common part of the writing process, the term also indicates a specific and sometimes controversial topic in language pedagogy and composition studies.

Sentence combining exercises
In a sentence combining exercise, a student is given several kernel sentences and must demonstrate proficiency in combining them. The student might be asked to preserve the vocabulary and key grammatical elements of the kernels, or might be encouraged to freely rewrite them. Here is a sample exercise:


 * All men are mortal.
 * Socrates is a man.
 * Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

A straightforward solution makes use of simple conjunction and some punctuation changes:


 * All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Possibilities both briefer and more verbose abound:


 * All men are mortal, including Socrates.


 * Socrates, like every other man, is mortal.


 * From Socrates' manhood, a condition characterized by mortality, follows his own.


 * If we accept the premise that all men are mortal, as do many theorists of international esteem, and if we admit the widely held assumption that Socrates is mortal – a proposition contested only by fringe groups – then we must recognize the unavoidable conclusion that Socrates is mortal.

Pedagogical history and controversy
Sentence combining exercises have appeared in American writing textbooks at least since the 1890s. They received increased attention from educators between the 1960s and the 1980s. Interest peaked in the 1970s with seminal texts by O'Hare and Strong. Frank O'Hare (Sentence-Combining: Improving Student Writing Without Formal Grammar Instruction, 1971) and William Strong (Sentence Combining: A Composing Book, 1973). 1983 saw the The Second Miami University Conference on Sentence Combining and the Teaching of Writing, but by 2000 one scholar lamented that the sentence as a pedagogical unit had been virtually “erased” from his colleagues' awareness.

Several factors have contributed to the debate and changing interest in sentence combining:

At a time when many educators emphasized traditional grammar instruction, with a focus on rules and nomenclature, proponents of sentence combining offered a new paradigm. They advocated sentence-combining as a more participatory approach to learning, in which students actually experimented with grammatical constructs rather than merely learning to identify them. Some educators claimed that sentence combining exercises alone, without formal grammar training, could build good writing skills. [Frank O'Hare (Sentence-Combining: Improving Student Writing Without Formal Grammar Instruction, 1971) .] Yet at times when the value of grammar instruction has come into question, exercises like sentence combining have sometimes been considered along with more traditional methods as outmoded: excessively technical and potentially stifling to creativity.

Debates about sentence combining have also involved the question of what constitutes good writing. Some educators have taken sentence length and complexity as a metric of mature writing, while others have contested that metric. The question of what constitutes good writing leads to the question of how those qualities can be measured in student work, and how changes in those qualities can be attributed to pedagogical techniques. Some educators have sought to validate sentence combining through the techniques of social science: formal experiments and statistical analysis that would prove its positive impacts on writing. Others have criticized such efforts to apply statistical criteria to the judgement of writing as an example of scientism.