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Teaching Grammar, Mechanics, and Style: An Instructional Sequence
How to deal responsibly and effectively with students’ “grammar” issues in a process-oriented course like Englwrit 112 is a perennial problem. The following sequence of modules is intended to demonstrate for instructors one way to solve that problem: an approach that’s embedded in and organic to the curriculum itself, that offers explicit attention to “style” every unit but doesn’t crowd out students’ actual writing, and that provides a coherent narrative about writing development in which specific skills build on one another as the semester progresses. These modules also ensure that students learn to use the Penguin Handbook and see the value of their investment in it. And they demonstrate to others – parents, faculty, employers – that the Writing Program takes seriously students’ sentence-level writing issues.
The modules are meant to take about 30-50 minutes each and be spread out across the semester. They are presented here in skeletal form; it’s up to instructors to fill them out with activities, handouts, etc. Examples and exercises should use students’ own texts as much as possible. Instructors should adapt the sequence as needed, adding or subtracting modules and developing new ones of their own (though we believe that the first and last are important and that some modules, e.g., 4 & 5, are practically required by the curriculum).
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Style Module 1. Looking at rather than through texts: Helping students see language as plastic and their stylistic options as many (Unit I)
The idea here is to begin work on “grammar” by focusing on the many options available to students, their power to vary language, and the constraints sometimes imposed by context (purpose, audience, occasion, etc.). Have students look at samples of their own and other’s texts, describe the grammatical/stylistic patterns they see (word choice, sentence style, paragraph length, punctuation used), and imagine alternatives. PH, ch. 1
Style Module 2. Working with sentence boundaries: Helping students understand how sentences work (and are punctuated) in standardized edited American English (Unit I)
This module reviews for students what they know about clauses and sentences, helping them avoid unintended fragments, run-ons, and comma splices. But you can also expand students’ syntactic repertoires by demonstrating ways to develop their sentences by left- and right-branching, combining shorter sentences into longer, more sophisticated ones, and untangling complex sentences so meaning is more clear. PH, chs. 27, 32-33, 38-39
Style Module 3. Integrating other people’s texts into our own: Helping students learn to introduce and embed direct quotations in their papers (Unit II)
Most of us are so accustomed to quoting others in our writing that we do it effortlessly. But, as Lester Faigley writes in the Penguin Handbook, “a common mistake [for students] is to drop in quotations without introducing them or indicating their significance” (232). This module is meant to give students practice in this surprisingly subtle, but enormously important, skill in academic writing. And to help them see that, in their essays, others’ words and ideas should almost always be subordinate to their own. PH, chs. 21-22
Style Module 4. MLA Style explained! Part 1, the “Works Cited” page: Helping students learn the rules and rationales of MLA citation style (Unit III)
A key goal of College Writing is to prepare students for the kinds of writing done at a research university, a key attribute of which is the way academic writers situate themselves in communities of inquiry, building on, responding to, and anticipating others’ claims. An important skill in that enterprise in learning to cite sources. The goal here is not slavish rule-following but understanding why academic writers do the sometimes strange things they do. PH, ch. 23
Style Module 5. MLA Style explained! Part 2, in-text citations: Helping students learn the rules and rationales of MLA citation style, cont’d (Unit III)
The module above focuses on the main elements of a “works cited” entry: author, title, and publication information. This module, by contrast, looks at how to cite sources in the text itself. Included is a review of summary, paraphrase, and quotation from Unit II. Connected to all this should be a thoughtful discussion of plagiarism. Finally, help students situate MLA style in a broader academic context that includes other citation styles, each one (like MLA) always being updated. PH, ch. 23
Style Module 6. Document design and preparation: Helping students learn to format their finished texts according to audience expectations and other considerations (Unit III)
The sample first page of a student paper on p. 142 of the Penguin Handbook demonstrates how trivial yet important formatting “rules” can be. The fact that the Writing Program now recommends spacing papers at 1.5 lines rather than 2 underscores how such “rules” are never written in stone. But the wider message of Part 4 of the PH is our message, too, which is that students need to learn to control their options as text-makers. PH, chs. 13-15
Style Module 7. Brevity, the heart of communication: Helping students toggle from fulsomeness to concision and back again (Unit IV)
Pruning written texts of unnecessary verbiage is an important editing skill for any college-educated writer. In fact, in some disciplines, the wordiness associated (unfortunately) with English majors is considered almost a character flaw! But conciseness is hard to learn without also developing its opposite, an ability to repeat, vary, and augment. As Erasmus put it centuries ago, “no artist will better compress speech . . . than he [sic] who has skill to enrich” (On Copia, p. 14). PH, ch. 28
Style Module 8. Elegance, the soul of discourse: Helping students unlock the mysteries of parallelism, figurative language, etc. (Unit IV)
“Advanced” textual features like parallelism might seem low-priority in a course like ours, but relatively simple verbal “tricks” can “win friends and influence people” – at least in some situations. The idea here is to help students have fun with language, reinforce our earlier message about stylistic options, and give students concrete skills useful in their discursive lives. PH, chs. 27, 29-30
Style Module 9. My styles, my selves: Helping students reflect on a semester of playing with words, sentences, paragraphs, and whole texts (Unit V)
At the end of the semester, students should have the chance to reflect on what they’ve learned about grammar/style over the course of the semester. By this time, they’ll have lots of their own writing to describe and analyze, as well as a chance to set goals for their further development as writers. PH, ch. 1
