Once students can identify all the subordinate and main clauses in a text, they can really begin to get into serious questions of style. Each semester, after we have spent approximately three weeks analyzing clause structure, my college Freshman composition students analyze a short passage (approximately 250 words) of their own writing. On the day that this assignment is due, the students work in small groups to check each other's work, and I wander from group to group answering questions. This group work is very important because it makes students see how their own writing compares with that of their peers. Because the course is not a grammar course, we only have time to consider clause length and subordination, but there are other aspects of style that can be considered. Main Clause Length When most teachers think of style, they think of parallel constructions, sentence variety, and advanced constructions such as appositives. They don't usually think of main clause length, but the average length of a writer's main clauses may be one of the most fundamental aspects of her or his writing style. By the time we get to analyzing their own writing, my students are well familiar with the KISS pyscholinguistic model of how the brain processes sentences. I therefore explain to students that their instructors in electronics, forestry, culinary arts, etc. obviously do not count words per main clause, but they still feel the rhythm established by the "dumping" of the contents of short-term memory into long-term. I simply use numbers, and count out loud: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 dumpas opposed to: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 dumpMy students seem to get the idea. Over the years, my students have, as a group, averaged very close to fifteen words per main clause, and I suggest that perhaps that is the range that they want to be in. They range, however, from an average of nine words per main clause to an average of twenty-four. Referring to the research of Hunt, etc., I point out that twelfth graders average around 14 words per main clause, ninth graders average around 10.5, and professional writers come in at about 20. Generally speaking, therefore, if their average main clause length is short, they may sound, to their electronics instructor, etc., like middle school students. If an instructor, after reading their paper, is wobbling between a "B" and a "C," the student who writes short main clauses is more likely to get the "C" -- middle school students can't understand college level electronics. I do point out to them that short main clause length may be offset by advanced constructions such as appositives and gerundives, both of which shorten main clauses. Because we cannot get to these constructions in the Freshman composition class, I mark advanced constructions in their writing samples when I review them. If, however, a student's writing reflects both short main clauses and a lack of advanced constructions, I suggest sentence-combining. At the other extreme, of course, are the students who average more than twenty words per main clause. To them I suggest that they may well be getting lower grades than they deserve simply because they are writing "over their instructors' heads." If professional writers average twenty words per main clause, then that is probably what most instructors are accustomed to reading. The psycholinguistic model reflects how the brain processes sentences, and it suggests that if main clauses become too long, the process crashes -- and readers get lost. Students who average more than twenty words per main clause are thus risking overwhelming an instructor's processing ability. For these students, I suggest de-combining. One of the nice things about this approach is that the majority of the students fall within the thirteen to twenty word range, and they justifiably feel good about their writing. For the students at the extremes, I do not suggest formal exercises in sentence combining or de-combining. Rather, I suggest that, in the process of editing their papers, they look for two or three sentences to combine (or de-combine). Because they can identify clauses, and because they have seen a variety of combinations in the passages which we analyze as a class, they can usually apply this advice, if they choose to do so. And, because they have done an analysis of their own writing with the opportunity to see the work of their classmates, they are more motivated to try the application. The major disadvantage of my own work is that it is a one-shot application. I point out to students the problem of the hasty generalization -- they have analyzed only one sample of their writing. And, because we have spent only three weeks on sentence structure, many of the students feel insecure about analyzing the clause structure of their writing on their own. If students could begin this type of analysis in seventh grade, and analyze even just one passage of their writing each year, they would feel much more comfortable with both the validity of the resulting statistics and their conscious mastery of clause structure. Subordinate Clauses per Main Clause
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