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In 2007 writing-instruction legends Steve Graham and Dolores Perin did a meta-analysis on a massive scale to get to the bottom of what works when it comes to writing instruction. The result, a report called Writing Next, offered eleven recommendations for better writing instruction that is still considered the gold standard by many. Most of the eleven recommendations wouldn’t surprise veteran composition teachers. They suggested things like the use of models and mentor texts, having students engage in a writing process, and peer review during drafting and revision. 

There was one surprising detail though: Of the eleven recommendations, there was only one specific mention of a writing instruction topic that teachers should cover, and it wasn’t punctuation, argumentation, rhetoric, or vocabulary. Instead it was sentence combining (p. 4)—hardly the topic that many teachers might expect.

Of course, Graham and Perin weren’t arguing that punctuation or argumentation shouldn’t be taught; their job was to look for larger meta-trends in writing instruction. Instead the story is that, according to their research, the effect size of sentence combining, which is essentially learning how to use different sentence structures, is so large that it is a meta-trend all by itself.  

It has been over ten years since I first encountered Writing Next, and in those ten years, I have indeed found sentence combining (which I call sentence structure in my classes) to be one of the most game-changing—and underused—things writing teachers can teach. I believe in it so much that I have a whole chapter devoted to it in my upcoming book Good Grammar: Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons That Work for More Students.

When it comes to why teaching sentence structures works so well, one of the better explanations I’ve read comes in Between the Commas when the author, Martin Brandt, explains the thinking of writing theorist Francis Christensen: 

[Christensen] determined that the longer sentences that characterize the work of adult writers were the result of “free modifiers”—phrase or clause structures added with commas to the subject-verb core…For Christensen, “The kind [of sentence] we can best spend our efforts trying to teach, is what we may call the cumulative sentence”  

Between the Commas, p. 36-37

There, in Christensen’s theory and Brandt’s words, is why learning about sentence structure matters: Put simply, we associate strong writers with those who regularly add clauses and phrases in interesting ways to the sentence core. My theory for why this has such a large impact is that we naturally combine structures when we speak, and so the writers who do it thoughtfully end up sounding more alive, more personal, and more engaging. In other words, they have more of that often ill-defined “voice” that composition teachers so often talk about. 

Graham and Perin were hardly the first to suggest sentence combining; discussion of different sentence structures has likely been around as long as discussion of language and grammar has. Even still, meaningful instruction concerning sentence structures is still fairly rare in modern composition classes, likely because students often struggle to understand or care about it.

That is why today, I wanted to share three tips on the best practices I’ve found for teaching about the humble sentence and how it can be glued, diced, reconfigured, and sculpted. Here they are:

#1: Start With Why It Matters

I start my sentence structure unit the same way I start all of my grammar/language units: With why it matters—why it is worth their time to learn about sentence structure when many of them can intuitively write with some pretty structures already. My favorite way to do that is to have students select a handful of school-friendly, mega-hit songs for us to unpack. Usually I say that the songs they choose must have at least a billion streams/views to ensure that they are true ear-worms, and I tell them that our job is to get to the bottom of what makes them so catchy. 

I’ve done this with dozens of songs by this point, and a core answer for why any song with 1,000,000,000+ streams/views works so well invariably comes down to the songs having varied and unique cadences: Soaring ups and cavernous lows, moments of pronounced slowing and whiplash-inducing acceleration, all done at just the right times. 

After exploring these songs, I then explain that the written word acts in the same way. To truly connect and move, writers need to be able to produce highs and lows, speed things up, slow them down just as fast, and produce a cadence that feels just right for the moment. And the engine for doing that is sentence structure.

#2: Make the Types of Structures Clearer

Sentence structure is often taught by teaching the “four types of sentences” (simple, complex, compound, complex-compound). This is how my sentence structure and units began a decade ago, but I found that my students often struggled with the distinction between these four types of sentences for the following reasons: 

• A simple sentence can sound to many students like a lesser sentence, but some of the greatest sentences in history are simple sentences: “He loved Big Brother.” from 1984 or Dr. King’s proclamation that “I have a dream today.” are simple sentences. Also, simple sentences aren’t always so simple. “The girl—a freckle-faced brunette, about ten years old, in a striped dress and sandals—bought an ice cream cone and took it to the park,” is technically a simple sentence because indeed it only has one clause (Modern Language Association of America).
• A complex sentence sounds impressive, but it isn’t necessarily so. “After he ate, he went to bed,” is technically a complex sentence, though I don’t think the sentence is very impressive.
• A compound sentence makes it sound like any combining means a sentence is compound, but there are many ways to combine a sentence that aren’t compound sentences.

This is why, instead of using the four types of sentences, I introduce sentence structures based on what various structures can do for the writer. Specifically, I teach the following structures, at a minimum:

• I teach adjective clause/phrases, adverb clause/phrases, and the introductory clauses, so students know how to add more information about the things and actions in their sentences. 
• I teach them how authors use lists and appositives to add more information about something in an economical way. 
• And I show them how a little sentence glue (often a comma and conjunction, but also other things like semicolons or parentheses) can allow them to combine as many ideas as they want. 

My goal with this approach is to show them that understanding of sentence structure gives them opportunities to do more things, and doing more things will better allow them to better move their readers and bring their unique cadence and style to the page. 

#3: Welcome Them to the Club by Showing the Possibilities 

Early in our conversation about sentence structure, I will often, maybe somewhat conspiratorially, lean-in and say that knowing how to purposefully manipulate sentence structure is a secret of established authors that we don’t always do a good job of telling students about. 

I then follow this by saying But now you know. You have the power and the possibilities that come with it too. I then share a ton of examples of that power and those possibilities over the unit. Three favorites to pass along at the start of my sentence structure unit are excerpts of Kiese Laymon’s (2019) “Bedtime Songs,” Jesmyn Ward’s (2018) “My True South,” and Ross Gay’s (2020) “Have I Even Told You Yet About the Courts I’ve Loved?” (I only show excerpts of this one; not all of it is school-appropriate for my students, but the structures are amazing). I love pairing these three because they all discuss the topic of going home, and yet they do it in such unique ways and using such interesting structures. 

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There is a lot more to share about sentence structure in the future, but I’ve found that students, once they get into it, really love it because it is so concrete and so instantly powerful. And I’ve found these three elements to be the most critical to creating an effective sentence structure unit. I hope they can help your units to be effective too. 

Thanks for reading, and yours in teaching,

Matt

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