This study investigated the pattern of growth in syntactic fluency of college-preparatory students in grades 7-12. Its primary purpose was to examine the syntactic structures employed in samples of narrative writing by the 12 different groups (totaling 216 students) that comprised the study sample. A secondary purpose was to determine which of…

Since clauses are the largest functional components of a sentence, their analysis can increase attention to sentence structure and stylistic variation. Students can learn to distinguish main clause types by naming the verb forms used (transitive, intransitive, equational, and passive). Once students have mastered the recognition of main clauses,…