The purpose of this research was to determine the effects of Cardio-Syntactic Analysis instruction on writing scores in an 11th grade English class. The sample consisted of 35 students enrolled in an Honor's English 11 class at Volunteer high School, in Church Hill, TN. The class was randomly assigned into an experimental group of 17 students and…

A study of the effect of an "incremental" version of a generative rhetoric approach to writing instruction was conducted to determine whether such an approach would increase students' syntactic complexity. Ninety-eight college students were randomly assigned to one of five experimental or five control sections of a freshman composition…

The purpose of this study was to develop a sentence-combining system for teaching composition to seventh grade students. The exercises were designed so as to be independent of the students' previous knowledge of grammar. Chapter 1 examines recent studies in language and writing. The first part of chapter 2 demonstrates that normal growth in…

If college freshmen know something about syntax, have practiced combining and breaking down sentences, and have learned to think in terms of deep structures and surface structures, they may be better able to understand and relieve the discomfort caused by a garbled key sentence structure. Grammar instruction in freshman composition provides a…

Two studies were conducted to test Francis Christensen's theory of generative rhetoric, which maintains that students should be taught the types of sentences that they infrequently use, especially ones with nonrestrictive phrasal modifiers (participial phrases and appositives) as a way to approach invention. The first study examined the principles…

Examines the use of sentence combining as a bridge between grammar and rhetoric during the past 100 years. (MM)