Where Do Sentences Come From?

My mother is a 6th grade teacher at Donner Springs Elementary in Reno, NV.  Yes - it is named after the ill-fated Donner Party, which seems a bit gruesome when you think about it.  However, since I was born and raised in Reno where the Donner name has been given to lakes, parks, and springs, I find it pretty banal.

Since my mom and I are both teachers, we frequently talk about the teaching of writing - what is our goal exactly and what is the best way to teach students how to write well?  She recently sent me a link to Verlyn Klinkenborg's article "Where Do Sentences Come From?" which appeared in the August 13th edition of the New York Times.  The article points to a problem that us English teachers have had for years - how do we make student writing activities more authentic?  Sentences are typically constructed for purposes - aesthetic beauty, convincing others of political beliefs, sharing feelings of love, communicating priorities at work, and more - but too frequently our classroom writing activities forget this key fact.

As English teachers, our goal is to craft writing assignments that are authentic and purposeful, but continuously we find ourselves assigning theme papers on The Great Gatsby or Romeo and Juliet that feel more like exercises in which students spit our own opinions back at us.  As a field, we have not fully dealt with this problem, but we do have many promising activities and ideas that will help better prepare students for the authentic writing tasks they will face later in careers and college.  I hope that as you follow this blog, you will be able to follow along with many of the promising changes and innovations in writing instruction that are happening and being brought into the classroom.

On a tangential note, my AP students and I spent the summer reading articles from The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's.  One of my students read an article that I also read and found interesting as an English teacher, Jack Hitt's "Words On Trial".  Hitt provides an overview of forensic linguistics - a growing English field that analyzes writings in order to identify suspected criminals and was partially responsible for the capture of the Unabomber.  Forensic linguists analyze writing style and colloquial language to identify the age, region, and profession of suspects. Interestingly enough, our sentences come partially from our experience of the world - the dialects we have encountered, education we received, and fields we worked in - and they can also betray us in ways that we are not aware.