Considers ways to diagnose and group ESL (English as a Second Language) students for writing instruction that is based on sentence combining. Suggests available materials to use with this technique, and offers specific examples of the use of sentence combining to generate prenominal adjectives and relative clauses. (RL)

Since introducing a grammar unit can be daunting and frustrating for both teachers and students, a collaborative unit for a 10th-grade class was planned that would satisfy an administrative requirement but also maintain the integrity of the writing program. The unit was planned by developing an approach of non-intrusive grammar instruction at the…

To determine the relationship between handwriting speed and syntactic complexity, a study examined the syntactic features of 60 students enrolled in either a basic writing course or a traditional college composition course. Fast and slow handwriting were identified from highest scores on any one of four writing "tests." The writing…

The "Write a Sentence Test" was developed for use in the evaluation of student writing abilities in association with a project in Memphis, Tennessee. This paper discusses ways of administering and scoring the test, decisions concerning modification of the test, and experiences when the test was administered to sample subjects. All forms…

One of six related documents, making up a U.S. Air Force correspondence course, this publication deals with effective writing and emphasizes the sentence as the basic unit of written communication. Part one focuses on internal sentence punctuation and covers the use of the comma, semicolon, colon, period, capital, abbreviations, and numbers. Part…

This paper discusses the importance of helping college composition students to become stylistically competent and cites a study that examined the essays of 32 college students and 27 skilled adult writers. T-unit measurements revealed that there is little difference between the groups in the number of clauses per T-unit, but the skilled writers…

A study was conducted to ascertain if the teaching of sentence building by means of specific sentence patterns would result in an increased use of these sentence patterns in the written compositions of second grade children. Writing samples were obtained from a group of second grade children both before and after the treatment and were analyzed…

This paper discusses error analysis, which is based upon the premise that all language, even "incorrect" language, is governed by rules, and the application of such analysis to the comma splice and the fused sentence. Many students formulate erroneous theories of punctuation based on spoken-language experience or on misleading definitions; in…

Researchers examined the first in-class essays and the final exam essays of 24 freshman writing students to determine the syntactic maturity these students gained during an eight-month period. Counting the words, T-units, clauses, and sentences for each of the 48 essays created data about mean words per T-unit, clauses per T-unit, words per…

Current research in reading indicates that what the reader brings to the printed page is far more important to comprehension than the information appearing there. This paper presents a model of how the integration of reading and writing skills can be undertaken, thereby strengthening both skill areas. With selections from a literary text and a…

The purpose of the study was to apply various quantitative and qualitative indices of grammatical complexity proposed by Hunt (1965) to written language samples of hearing impaired students. Hunt studied grammatical structures of normal students at three grade levels, and found that the minimal terminal syntactic unit, or T-Unit, more reliably…

To determine whether significant differences exist between a class taught generative rhetoric and a class taught traditional methods of writing, a strategy was developed for teaching the generative rhetoric of the sentence and the paragraph in a first-semester composition course composed of average students. The 56 subjects were randomly assigned…

Basic to composition skill is control of sentence structure and accuracy in mechanics. Although it is often said that a student should not write what he has not first heard and practiced orally, it might equally well be said that he should not be expected to write grammatical patterns that he has not read, inasmuch as there is a difference in the…

The purpose of this study was to test the effects of relevant instructional variables operating in the post-stimulus period of prewriting on the syntactic complexity (as measured by mean T-unit length) and on syntactic clarity (as measured by number of faulty word order errors) of children's written composition. A short film was used as the…

Sentence analysis by the Reed and Kellogg technique of diagraming can present the exact function of every clause in the sentence, of every phrase in the clause, and of every word in the phrase. Furthermore, it can teach the pupil to look through the literary order and discover the logical order, and it is from the teacher that the student learns…