Outlines three criteria that justify using passive voice. Claims teaching sentence focus--keeping the topic of the sentence in the subject position--will accomplish the end of teaching the appropriate uses of active and passive voice (NH)

Examines the problems the passive voice element creates for style in technical writing. (HTH)

Reviews and compares views of grammarians, usage experts, and authors of technical writing books concerning "dangling participles." Finds many unattached clauses are unacceptable, some are less objectionable, and still others are acceptable. Notes that cultural (and perhaps gender) differences between humanistic teachers and…

Punctuation is not necessary in a sentence if a pair of adjacent words suggests an intentional conceptual relationship. However, when the pair suggests a relationship that is not a part of the intended communication, the writer must alert the reader, so some punctuation is necessary. When members of an adjacent pair do not suggest a plausible…

Proposes "organizational trees" as a means of helping students understand that each sentence in an essay must have purpose and direction. (FL)

The writing of ESL students, while sophisticated in some respects, often contains fragments and run-ons. Because these students have no reliable, self-monitoring system for analyzing their writing and because they believe they are communicating effectively, they fail to recognize their difficulties in forming complete sentences. This paper…

Examines the effect of the misuse and over-use of logical connectives in English-as-a-Second-Language undergraduate writing, and suggests that students use a small subset of relatively comprehensible connectives, employ connectives for phrasal expansion, and view logical progression as an integral stage in writing. (Author/CB)

Suggests that work with the cumulative sentence can have an immediate and profound impact on student writing in the areas of grammar, organization, and specificity. Finds the use of the cumulative sentence helpful as a sentence-combining technique and for several other aspects of composition and grammar. (MS)

Suggests that teaching students to achieve coherence involves teaching them what it means to plan and to move up and down a hierarchy of abstraction as well as teaching them to build cohesive links into their writing. Describes a program for teaching coherence. (RL)

Draws on concept learning research to address the problem of grammatical explanations that may be perfectly clear to the teacher or textbook writer but that leave students groping for help. Describes problems that students have in learning grammatical concepts, and provides strategies to overcome those problems. (RS)

Examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s (the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining) and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. Concludes that this erasure of sentence…

The two essays in this booklet reflect the spirit and ideas of Francis Christensen, specifically his exhortations to composition teachers, illustrated by his own practice, to approach the teaching of writing inductively, to look always to the writing of professionals for models, and to behave as scholars. The first essay, on sentence modelling,…

Sentence combining can teach students one of the most difficult aspects of the writing process--how to construct effective, versatile sentences. In sentence combining exercises, students take a series of short sentences and combine them into a longer and more elaborate sentence in such a way that the important information from each short sentence…

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…

When writing, few students have any concept that word placement affects the content of their writing. They seldom rework their papers at the sentence level in order to assure that their grammar reflects and enhances their content. Recognizing the relationship of grammar to meaning, composition researchers are reasserting the place of grammar in…