The Death of the Sentence? Oh my!

At the recent release of the NAEP scores, Librarian of Congress James Billington sent out a cry concerning the "slow destruction of the basic human thought--the sentence."

The most recent test scores show that only one-third of 8th graders in this country can write with proficiency. Billington, among many others, blame online communication and herald the end of the sentence as we know it.

This is no new debate. Text messaging and IM speak has been seeping its way into student writing since the turn of the century. If you work with high schoolers, you know that most of them come to you as poor writers. It is what has lead to such an influx of writing workshop-style classes, even at the collegiate level.

But the demise of that basic human thought goes back even further than the late 90s. Wilson Follett wrote for Atlantic Magazine that the sentence is a "structure greatly faithful to the pattern of consciousness" and insisted that the sentence was under attack. In 1937. At a time when sentences were long, loopy, and followed no strict grammatical rules.

Now our students are concise. To a fault.

What scares me more than the imminent demise of the sentence is the soon-to-follow revival of DOL--daily oral language. Grammar in isolation. My arch-nemesis. Students are not going to learn how to use commas correctly by copying a sentence with no commas and guessing where they are supposed to go. In fact, I would bet my next paycheck that more than half of the warm bodies in the room sit there and wait for the correct answer. So they are copying down WRONG SENTENCE STRUCTURES and then adding in commas, capitalization, etc. arbitrarily. Hmmmm...sounds like a sure fix.

So what can teachers do? Work with mentor texts. One teacher had great success with inner-city minorities and dictation. I have used short snippets that showcase what I want students to grasp. Working with descriptive passages? Pull out brief examples from a variety of young adult novels and let students highlight what they consider to be excellent details from the passage. Then they can go back to their own piece to make revisions.

Grammar instruction in isolation is not the answer. We can however embrace text-speak and teach students appropriate times to use it. This isn't a new battle for teachers. The enemy has just morphed into a new shape.