In spite of the growth in popularity of sentence combining over the last 20 years, few teachers use it in technical writing classes, either because the exercises are inappropriate or because teachers fear that sentence combining will teach students to write longer rather than better sentences. Sentence combining can, however, teach technical…

Reports of classroom research on the effectiveness of sentence combining as a teaching technique. Notes the value of in-class research. (RL)

Intended for elementary school teachers in all subject areas wanting to learn more about what is known concerning the teaching of writing, this book summarizes numerous presentations made over the past four years by the many teacher/consultants working with the Bay Area Writing Project. Following introductory materials, the first section of the…

The instructor of two twelfth grade English classes, one a composition class and the other a general English class, gave both classes some exercises in sentence combining. In the first exercise, the students were given two sentences and told to devise as many combinations as possible. While the composition class contributed more combinations than…

Sentence combining activities can be used throughout the English curriculum. The entire composing process can be developed with sentence combining activities based on student rough drafts of book reports, analysis and imitation of sentences written by professional writers, the organization of sentences in whole paragraphs or essays, and "oral…

Research on the relationship between syntactic complexity and quality of written composition was reviewed to test the assumption that these two concepts are positively related. The studies reviewed, which have appeared during the past 15 years, fall into two broad categories: (1) intervention studies designed to increase syntactic complexity and…