About 10 years ago, Robert J. Connors's article "The Erasure of the Sentence" questioned the disappearance of writing style and examined the validity of some of the reasons given for its disappearance. Since that 2000 article, the study of style has undergone a kind of renaissance, with numerous books and articles on its uses in composition theory…

A paper presented at annual convention of National Council of Teachers of English (60th, Atlanta, November 27, 1970.) (Editor)

Author details why the psychological studies of Jean Piaget have specific relevance to the teaching of poetry, especially his thought matrix which consists of four transformational processes: identity, inversion, reciprocity and correlation. (Author)

The value of a transformational model of syntax can be illustrated by comparing the taxonomic grammatical description of a complex sentence to a transformation-oriented description of the same sentence. The taxonomic approach, an immediate constituent analysis, requires 10 steps to break the sample sentence into its grammatical components; the…

Sentence combining practices works best as a skill-building adjunct to regular composition work. (JH)

English teachers have a responsibility to interpret for students the current linguistic insights into language and to lead them in an open-minded inquiry involving (1) careful observation of language data, (2) translation of this observation into rule-like descriptions, and (3) verification of the rules to determine if revisions must be made. In…

When ninth-grade students are searching for help in expressing their newly discovered ideas, the principles of transformational grammar can be brought to their aid in the following ways: (1) Assign a provocative topic to the students which they are to discuss as fully as possible in one sentence. (2) Present only the kernel sentences of a…