Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 41: Art of the sentence
Building ratio through writing

In Everybody Writes I defined two types of writing: formative and summative. Now I want to introduce a third: developmental writing, which is writing designed to build syntactic control though deliberate practice. In a moment I will define those terms, but first I want to explain why developmental writing is so important.

Not long ago I visited a highly successful school. Instruction was strong and the kids had bought in to the culture. They loved being there, worked hard, and were happy; they were very successful—arguably the best school in the city it served. But the school had asked my team and me to help them think about their reading outcomes, which lagged behind the rest of their outstanding results.

I remember one English classroom in particular. Students were reading a challenging novel and paused to write about it during class. Their Silent Solo (technique 39) was perfect and they wrote with energy and commitment from the moment the teacher said “Go!” until she said, “OK, pencils down.” But as they wrote I walked around the room and read over students' shoulders. What I saw was an immense amount of diligent but often inchoate writing—phrases and words strove to express ideas but were not quite coherent. There would often be a nicely chosen word, an insightful phrase in the midst of a ramshackle sentence, but the pieces did not add up. The whole was almost always lesser than the sum of the parts. Students tried hard but did not produce clear ideas or arguments.

What students lacked was syntactic control, which Bruce Saddler defines as “the ability to create a variety of sentences that clearly express an intended meaning.”⁶

To master a sentence, to render unto it the power to capture a complex thought with nuance and precision, one must master a set of tools that are rarely named and even more rarely taught—in part, because we often scorn them.

The sentence in the previous paragraph, for example, required a pair of introductory prepositional phrases, the second echoing the first in vaguely appositive-like manner. It required an em dash. It required subordinating conjunctions. I had to construct a sentence in which the subject—“one,” by the way—was the twentieth word.

Don't try to deny it. As soon as you read the words introductory prepositional phrases, the music stopped and the party ended. A few readers crossed themselves reflexively at the sound of those ancient pagan words. Oh, others thought, he's going in for “grammar.” I knew he was old school, but …

Grammar, as all good people know, is cruel to children. Most modern teachers will tell you that it is of limited use, the passion of ancient scolds, only faintly visible, now, in the chalk dust of time.

“For me, grammar instruction is about sentence structure,” writes Daisy Christodoulou. “It's about helping students to marshal their thoughts into coherent, logical sentences.”⁷ Its purpose is syntax, and mastery of syntax remains something that we can teach joyfully and successfully without memorizing a thousand terms, like adverbial modifier.⁸ Syntactic forms are magical tools and, happily, carefully designed writing exercises can develop them.

Coordination and subordination are good examples. When used adroitly those ands and buts and sos and despites are tools of syntax. They wander the earth humbly seeking to explain to us the ways that ideas are connected. They quietly tell us: There are two ideas here, but one is more important than the other. Or caused the other. Or the second idea is contingent upon the other happening first. Or contrasts with the first.

It is a superpower, when a person can coordinate and subordinate deftly and smoothly. The connections between ideas often create the lion's share of the meaning. But they are also where it all comes apart for many students, in reading as well as writing. When reading complex text, the words and phrases within a sentence may be clear enough on their own, but piecing together the interrelationships among them can still pose a problem. Your student understands the idea in the first half of the sentence but misses the syntactic cue that explains its relationship to the second half. Suddenly she is lost. Readers who do not have mastery of the hidden vocabulary of syntax are always fighting a rising tide of meaninglessness. For writers who lack syntactic control, all but the simplest strands of thought resist their mastery. Precision matters because ideas are brought into being by the words that create them. Before that they are just the stuff of fog and instinct. “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought,” is how W. H. Auden expressed this idea.

Art of the Sentence (AOS) is the name for tools designed to teach syntactic control, happily in quite enjoyable ways and without even a whiff of sentence diagramming.

Those tools rely in part on short exercises, each with a clear goal in which students use and master specific aspects of syntactic control. Deliberate practice, if you will. You probably think students already get a ton of practice with their writing but, as Judith Hochman notes in her outstanding book The Writing Revolution,⁹ writing gets assigned a lot but not taught a lot.

There are two things a developmental writing exercise needs to work: depth of content and scarcity. The two work together. As Judith Hochman points out, developmental writing must always be embedded in the content you are teaching. Students have to have an idea of substance to wrestle with and they have to know things connected to that idea (recall Daniel Willingham's observation that I discuss in Chapter One that higher-order thinking relies on background knowledge). When students have plenty to say about a concept and are driven to express it, you then introduce scarcity. Usually this means requiring them to write a single sentence. This causes outward pressure on the sentence—students who want to say a lot but are limited to a single sentence must suddenly begin using a new and expanded version of the sentence to get it all in. Necessity is the mother of syntactical invention.

You can see this in a moment from the video of Jamila Hammet's lesson that we watched in the discussion of Silent Solo. Her students are reading Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn-Dixie, a novel about the deep relationship between a girl and her dog. Students are asked to look at a picture of an adorable and loving dog, who reminds them of Winn-Dixie perhaps, and describe how they feel when they look at the dog. Without scarcity a student could write: “I love this dog. He's cute and I'd want to play with him. I'd want to throw him a ball and let him fetch. I'd like to see if he wants to tuck in beside me and watch a movie.”

What you might get, in other words, is what we do get so often. Relatively wooden, unimaginative writing using simple and receptive sentence construction.

But a student forced to put all their thoughts into a single sentence might write:

I love this dog because he's so cute and I imagine us playing, me throwing him a ball to fetch or else the two of us tucked in on the couch watching a movie.

That's a sentence pushing outward on the student's limits. The student is expanding how much she can capture, and how well, in “a complete thought.” Notice all the syntactic tools that have been brought to bear—I'm honestly not sure what to call them all. Scarcity caused that—scarcity combined with students having a lot to say and ideally knowing a fair amount about a topic.

You should also expect errors to show up as students try to write more complex sentences, by the way. Of course they will. It's a good thing—they're at the edge of their mastery. Make sure to combine AOS and other developmental writing exercises with technique 42, Regular Revision, to ensure a strong balance of exploration and accuracy.

But Art of the Sentence also often includes additional constraints and parameters that make the practice deliberate and cause students to focus on using specific syntactic tools. They also make the exercises even more interesting.

For example, Jamila might have asked her students to write a single sentence about the dog in the picture but begin with the phrase “Looking at the dog …” She would then cause students to practice using a sophisticated grammatical form—an introductory participial phrase. Or she could have asked them to start their sentence with: “When one looks at a dog like this …” Now she'd be causing them to use “one” as the subject. If students are going to read sentences like that, creating them intentionally can help a lot.

Or Jamila could have asked students to start “At first glance …” Now students would be using an introductory prepositional phrase, but she would also cause them to look at the picture twice. What did you not see at first that a second glance reveals?

Previously in her lesson Jamila had given students a nonfiction article to read about the history of animal-human bonds and the domestication of dogs. She could have asked students to “Write a single sentence describing how your reaction to the dog might explain some of the reasons why dogs became domesticated early on in human history. Use the word ’bond.’ Or quote a word or phrase from the article in your sentence.”

Rules like these allow you to deliberately choose words, phrases, or grammatical forms for students to practice using. Over time students develop facility with a wide range of them in their writing even if they don't know their names. As you're probably already thinking, this exposure strengthens students' ability to comprehend these sentences when they come across them while reading complex text.

Sentence Starters and Sentence Parameters

Let's take a second to define three types of AOS sentences. The first use “sentence starters,” specific verbiage that students must use at the outset of their writing such as:

Summarize the data from this graph in one complete well-written sentence that begins with the phrase “Over time …”

At first glance, a prompt with a sentence starter may appear to be easier to respond to than a prompt without one because it contains scaffolding, but in many ways the opposite can be simultaneously true. The sentence is now pushed into new and often unfamiliar syntactical territory. Without being pushed and stretched in such ways, students aren't likely to expand their repertoire of syntactical forms very much. Now, imagine the different sorts of phrases with which you could ask students to begin a sentence:

“Growing exponentially, …”

“The line that expresses the function …”

“The relationship between …”

“In the long run, …”

“When the line approaches vertical, …”

Each of these has a different effect on student writing and thinking, pushing them not only into new syntax but potentially into new thinking.

Another approach you can use to guide the sentences students write is sentence parameters. These range from asking students to use a specific word or phrase (for example, “Be sure to use the phrase ’stock character’ in your answer” or “Use the word ’ambiguous’”) to naming a specific grammatical form: “Write a sentence using a subordinate clause with the word ’despite’” or “Write a sentence beginning with a participial phrase.” You could also give parameters for length. “In a sentence of no more than eight words …” Or perhaps, if you wanted to go beyond the ’rule’ of a single sentence, you could teach sentence rhythm this way: “Describe the conflict in Goya's painting The Third of May in two sentences of at least twelve words and one of no more than five.” I personally like word limits. An unintended consequence of using AOS tools can be the tacit reinforcement of long sentences—that's often an outcome of pushing one's syntactic limits. But of course while one needs to be able to construct a long and/or complex sentence, long and complex sentences are not always better. Short and sweet is often the definition of excellence. So one parameter you might occasionally use—implicit in one of the sentences in this example—is a word limit: “In a sentence of six or fewer words …”

The third kind of AOS prompts are nondenominational. They simply ask students to capture a big idea in a single sentence with no other rules, often with a phrase like “in one carefully crafted sentence” or “in one beautiful sentence” to encourage students to take pride in the implicit challenge.

I noted that the prompt with a parameter may surprisingly be more rigorous. This is often true, but of course not always. Sometimes an open-ended prompt, such as “Describe Christopher's reaction in one artfully crafted sentence” is ideal, especially for students who have developed increasing fluidity with sentence structures. The best results are likely to come, I suspect, from asking students to write a balance of sentences both with and without parameters.

Finally, one ideal place to use AOS is at the end of a lesson, given that part of its purpose is to help students synthesize and summarize. Imagine a school where every lesson in every subject ended with students writing (and revising!) a single, artfully crafted sentence capturing with nuance and sophistication the most important or challenging idea from that lesson. Art of the Sentence, in short, can do great service as an Exit Ticket or as the next day's Do Now. Imagine: You wrap up the lesson by having everyone distill a key idea in writing; the next day, students get their sentences back with individualized guidance, such as “Revise to use the phrase in spite of” or “Rewrite, clarifying what the pronoun ’it’ refers to,” or with a challenge like “Great! Now see if you can use the word anabolic.”

Art of the Sentence Meets the Little Ones

You might be wondering: is this idea feasible with my little ones? I think the answer is yes. A lovely video of Brittany Rumph with her K/1 students, Brittany Rumph: Artful Sentence, shows a bit of what's possible.

Notice that students draft their sentences on worksheets that frame the writing like art in a museum. Later Brittany will put many of the best up on the walls to celebrate and encourage them, but the implicit message is By writing one beautiful sentence, every single one of you is creating art with your words.

Even without that detail, you know Brittany makes a big deal of student writing. The tone of celebration is everywhere—in the way she reads great sentences aloud and does a Call and Response to put an exclamation point on one student's use of the word “magnificent.” Her students' work, that of most students, is full as you might expect of invented spellings and the like. But it is also full of a capacity for complex syntax that's far ahead of what you might expect. Soon their spelling and handwriting will catch up and their syntactic control will serve them well. In Jeremiah's words, they'll be writing juicy sentences from the outset.

In the video Sarah Fischler: Exhausting Six Months, you can watch seventh-grade science teacher Sarah Fischler using AOS. My team and I love the range of prompts she uses—and the frequency, as well as the playful but practical specificity of her time limits (a great example of the effectiveness of precise time limits). Sarah's students process constantly in writing in a variety of ways and with pleasure.

Required Reading: The Writing Revolution

No book is better at helping educators think about expanding students' ability to craft sentences and expand their syntactic control than Judith Hochman's The Writing Revolution.¹⁰ Among the highlights are the developmental writing activities she suggests. These are similar to and work in synergy with Art of the Sentence work. We use them regularly in our Reading Reconsidered Curriculum. Some of the best extracts:

Because. But. So. Take a “kernel sentence” (a short simple sentence) and expand it three times, once each time using each of the three conjunctions, because, but, and so. Not only does it teach a core piece of syntactic control but it causes students to think about an idea in three different ways.

Appositives. Expand a kernel sentence with an appositive phrase. This teaches their use, the ability to insert ideas midsentence, and causes students to expand and apply more background knowledge.

Sentence expansion. Take a kernel sentence and expand it with some number of who, when, what, where, and why.

For examples of these and other Hochman gems, please see technique 42, Regular Revision.

One of the benefits of developmental writing is that it teaches grammar functionally, in the service of idea creation. To that end, schools might think about a scope and sequence of developmental writing activities to teach key elements of grammar in a systematic way. Here's a version of a very simple model I drafted while developing our Reading Reconsidered Curriculum: