The original plan of this book included chapters which would:

review previous statistical research,
distinguish between "official" and "unofficial" research,
suggest a national database and research committee for  "official" research,
create a national database for "unofficial" research,
and suggest guidelines for the "unofficial" database.

     I could not, however, consider this book as complete without discussing statistical research  by students in the classroom. Such research should be an integral part of instruction in grammar. The reason is simple. We know that words per main clause increase naturally with age and experience. But students do not. We know that we can predict the average number of words, subordinate clauses, etc., per main clause for a sample of students' writing. But students do not. We know which students are writing more (and less) syntactically mature sentences. But our students do not. By having students statistically analyze passages of their own writing, we are providing them not just with our knowledge, but also with the methods we used to obtain it. As a result, the knowledge is much more meaningful, not to mention reliable.

     As I have noted elsewhere, many years ago a retired government official took my Advanced Essay course. He said he wanted to write a book about the oil crisis, but he couldn't write. I couldn't find anything wrong with his writing, so each week I would ask him, "Why are you taking the course? Your writing is fine. Go and write your book." But he insisted that he couldn't write. Each week I would press him: "What's wrong with your writing?" Finally, he said, "My teacher said that my sentences are too long." Grammar was not part of that course, but one day after class we took several passages of his writing and did some statistical analysis. I explained what it meant, and referred him to other sources for verification. (Why should he trust me?) His writing averaged 21 words per main clause, slightly higher than the professional average of 20, but well less than the 26 word average I have found in the writing of professional educators. He was finally convinced that his sentences were OK. He could write!

     The story suggests the damage that can be done by teachers who tell students that their sentences are "too long" or "too short." If students, throughout their years in school, were to perform several such statistical analyses of their own writing, and match them against class averages, students would know for themselves where their writing stands. Currently, they do not.

     Almost every semester, my college Freshmen engage in a statistical research project. They select a piece of their own writing, analyze it, count the number of words, number of main clauses, number of subordinate clauses, and then I average out their figures. It continues to surprise me that the results always come very close, and sometimes precisely, to 15 words per main clause. I mention this here simply to suggest that students can begin to do small statistical research projects as soon as they understand multiplication and division. Third or fourth graders could write stories, identify the prepositional phrases, count the words in the phrases and in the story, and see how close they come to the adult average of 33% in prep phrases. (They should also, of course, discuss the effects of such phrases in the stories.) Statistical research by the students could and should be a continual adjunct of the grammatical curriculum.
 

     In the classroom, performing a statistical analysis of syntax can be educational for both teachers and students. Many teachers refer to and/or rely on the results of statistical research, but few teachers have ever conducted such research. Conducting it will enlighten them, as it did me, to its problems, strengths, and weaknesses. Suppose, for example, that a teacher has decided to have her class conduct such a project. The students select a sample of their own writing, analyze  it, and begin to count the number of, and number of words in, prepositional phrases. The class is working in small groups, checking each other's work. As the teacher roams the room, responding to questions, someone asks: "Mrs. Martin, Billy counted "for shooting arrows" as a prepositional phrase. Shouldn't the phrase just be "for shooting"? Does the object of a gerund count as part of a prepositional phrase, or doesn't it? Numerous such questions will arise, each of which will make the teacher more sensitive to the problems of such research.

     On the other hand, teachers may be surprised, as I have been, at how consistent some of the results are. As noted, my college Freshmen almost always average 15 words per main clause. And, as noted in Chapter Eight, the weakest writers fall at both extremes: the greatest and the fewest number of words per main clause. Thus, teachers will probably get a totally new perspective on each of their individual student's writing.

     Students will also gain from such projects. Most important, from the English teacher's point-of-view, the students will get a better understanding of how grammar relates to their own writing. But the project is also interdisciplinary. Students will be combining English grammar with statistics (math), and, if the teacher presents the model of reading suggested in this book, the students will also be learning something about psychology.
 

Warning

     Teachers will probably be surprised, puzzled, and sometimes frustrated if they undertake a project like this. Many teachers who think they know grammar -- because they can do the exercises in the grammar books -- are stumped by some of the things they find in students' writing. (How would you analyze: "I'd better go check?") Other teachers are frustrated because they come to realize how little students really understand grammar. (Many teachers assume that students can identify subjects and verbs. But most students cannot.)  The frustration may not be good for your health, but it is probably good for education. I assume that any teacher who even attempts a project such as this already teaches grammar. If you are stumped because you yourself have difficulty analyzing something, then you will have learned why students tend to hate/ignore instruction in grammar. (If something doesn't make sense to you, it almost certainly doesn't make sense to them.) If you are frustrated because students can't recognize verbs etc., then you should realize that all the advice you gave about agreement of subject and verb was meaningless. It may, in other words, be frustrating, but you will also find that what you are now teaching is actually meaningful to your students.
 

Types of Projects

     The most interesting project for students is probably the analysis of their own writing. Teachers probably should, however, go beyond the students' writing to their reading. As an example of what a teacher might do, let me use a fifth grade class, a class that has been taught to identify prepositional phrases in third and fourth grades.

     During the first half of the year, students would learn to identify subjects, verbs, and complements. Homework would be dittos of paragraphs or short essays written by previous fifth graders. Homework would be reviewed in class, not corrected by the teacher. Students' mastery of the skill would be judged with short in-class quizzes. Once students have basically mastered the skill, homework assignments would stop. 

[One way to handle this would be to give a one-sentence quiz once a week. When a student has earned a 100 on three quizzes, the homework assignments would become optional. While other students are reviewing the homework in class, these students could spend the time reading or writing. Once 80% of the class has earned a 100 on three quizzes, no more class time would be spent on reviewing homework. The 20% who have not done so would have to come in after class or after school. (A school with more than one fifth-grade class could establish a specific after-school day in which all these students would be expected to  participate, thereby relieving teachers from each class from having to work one-on-one with each of these students.)
    I can, by the way, see some teachers and administrators smiling, thinking that some of these students would never get a 100 on three quizzes. These are, I would suggest, the same teachers and administrators who are responsible for the failure of our school systems. Every fifth-grade student is capable of learning this skill. The problem has been that we, as a profession, have not required students to do it. All we need to do is to say: "Any student who does not get three 100's does not go on to sixth grade." [If OBE (Objectives-Based Education) is to mean anything, this is exactly the kind of objective that should be included in it.]
 

For a more current discussion of grammar in the curriculum, including grade levels, assignments, and standards, see "State Standards and Grammar in the Curriculum"

# words in prep phrases / # of words
# of subjects / # of words
# of verbs / # of words
# of complements / # of words
Total of above / # of words

     Another thing the students could calculate is the number of words divided by the number of S/V patterns. (What this would give them, of course, is the number of words per clause - main and subordinate.) They could also calculate the number of S/V/PN and S/V/PA patterns as a percentage of the total number of S/V/C patterns. This statistic might be of real interest. I am aware of teachers who force students to write and or rewrite papers without using the verb "to be," the most common verb in S/V/PN and S/V/PA patterns. Such instruction is not very good, since students do not understand what it is all about. But having students perform this statistical analysis might be very useful, particularly if their results are compared to those of their classmates and to those of professional writers. (Even more helpful, of course, would be a suggestion by the teacher of the weakness of  "to be," a suggestion which might become meaningful in view of the statistics and some examples.)

     Having selected the piece of writing, preferably something that was written in-class, the students would then analyze it as a homework assignment. When the assignment is due, the students should work in small groups in class to check each other's work -- both the syntactic analysis and the statistics. The statistical results of each student (preferably without names) can then be listed on a sheet of paper by the teacher. This list could be given to the students, who, working in the same or different groups, could calculate class averages, match their individual results against the averages, and write a report about what they learned in the project, a report that includes the list of individual statistics and the averages. These reports could then be put in a notebook, or, even better, bound [There are a number of inexpensive binding methods.] and put in the school library for use as reference material by future students. Once these bound reports appear in the library, students could then match their results -- and their class's averages -- both against those of students from previous years and against those of students from previous and future grades. In addition to studying grammar, these students would be engaged in (not just studying about) the scientific method -- performing an experiment, checking it against previous results, and publishing.

     Although the first project should definitely engage the students in the analysis of their own writing, in the second, teachers might want to have students analyze the writing of one of their classmates. Mary analyzes Sue's; Sue, Mary's. An advantage of this twist might be that Mary would analyze her own, as well as Sue's, since she wouldn't want Sue misrepresenting her writing.

     The additional projects would be limited only by the interests of the teacher and students. In one, the students might each select a passage from the newspaper. All the students who select a passage from the sports section work together as a group. The front-pagers form a group; the food section devotees form another group, etc. Statistical results could be calculated for each section of the newspaper as well as for the newspaper as a whole. Another project could focus on textbooks (with groups for history, science, English, etc.). Another could involve novels and/or short stories. Plays might be an interesting topic, since the syntax would be closer to  that of speech. Or students could form groups based on specific writers (Hardy Boys for boys; Nancy Drew for girls?) If the bound results of these projects include the original writing that was analyzed, another interesting project would be to re-view, i.e., re-analyze the writing from a previous class's study.

     Note that these projects need not consume a lot of class time, and the time they do consume would be devoted to small-group discussion/communication. And if the results are bound and put in the library, the school would end up with a resource that is more valuable than are the studies of Hunt, Loban, O'Donnell, and Vavra. We can be certain, for example, that the number of words per clause (total words divided by S/V/C patterns) will show an increase from 5th grade to sixth, to seventh, etc. (This might not be apparent after the first year's results, since the sample size will be small, but if Hunt, Loban, and O'Donnell are right, it will become apparent when one can combine the results of three or four year's studies.) Other distinctions should also become apparent -- there will be differences in the average words per clause for newspapers, different magazines, textbooks, different writers, etc. And these differences, of course, should become topics of class discussion.
 

Projects for Different Grade Levels

     Since the approach I am suggesting is not, to my knowledge, currently being used by anyone, the following are some suggestions for statistical projects for students at different grade levels. They are organized according to the syntactic curriculum suggested in Chapter Seven. Obviously, they could be used differently. Tenth-grade students who have just learned to analyze a passage for prepositional phrases might still find the projects suggested for third- and fourth-graders interesting. I caution, however, against the American Fallacy -- the attempt to rush natural development: fifth grade students should not be trying to identify clauses.

Grades Three and Four:

     Third and fourth graders are not ready for heavy statistical analysis, but projects such as those below would reinforce their knowledge of prepositional phrases and get them accustomed to the procedures of such analysis, thereby preparing them for fifth and sixth grade projects. A school system might decide to devote most of third grade to teaching students to recognize prepositional phrases, with perhaps one "statistical" project (of their own writing) near the end of the year. Fourth grade instruction in syntax might be limited to three or four additional projects, one or two of the student's own writing, and the others from each student's favorite stories.

1. What percentage of the total number of words is in prepositional phrases? (Count the number of words in prepositional phrases and divide by the total number of words in the passage.)
[Note: Some readers may find the explanations in parentheses superfluous, but I was surprised by the number of adults, some of them teachers, who needed them.]

2. Which prepositions are used, and how often?  What kind of information do these prepositions add? (List each preposition in the passage and count how often each is used. Calculate the percentage of use for each, i.e., "in" appears three times; there are 20 prepositions, so "in" accounts for 3/20 or 15% of the prepositional phrases. "In" provides information about place or time.)

Fifth and Six Grades

     Since fifth grade was used as the example in the preceding section, there is no need to repeat it. Sixth grade, in addition to a new analysis of the students' own writing, could be devoted to projects that were not done in fifth (different writers, newspapers, etc.) The idea would be to reinforce what students have already learned frequently enough so that they do not forget how to use it, but not so frequently as to make it boring or to take time away from other instruction. Some projects could be even more meaningful if the material to be analyzed could be selected by the students from things they are currently studying for other purposes (literature, history, or science).

Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Grades

     Since this approach is cumulative, projects should include most of what was suggested for earlier grades, but the subordinate clause naturally blossoms in grades seven, eight and nine, and thus clauses can be added to the statistical analysis. Some of the questions which might be addressed are:

1. What is the number of words per main clause? (Divide the total number of words by the total number of main clauses.)

2. What is the number of subordinate clauses per main clause? (Divide the total number of subordinate clauses by the total number of main clauses.)

3. What is the number of Noun, Adjective, and/or Adverbial clauses per main clause? (Divide the total number of  Noun, Adjective, and/or Adverbial clauses by the total number of main clauses.)

4. What percent of subordinate clauses is embedded at level 2, 3, or more? (Divide the total number of clauses embedded at level 2  etc. by the total number of subordinate clauses.)

5. Compounds account for what percent of main clauses? (Divide the number of main clauses which are the 2nd, 3rd, etc. in a compound sentence by the total number of main clauses. Note that I do not consider the first main clause in a compound sentence as a "compound." My reason is based on my model of language processing. (See Chapter Nine.) In the process of reading, the reader cannot tell whether or not the first main clause in a compound sentence is part of a compound sentence or not. Readers must therefore treat the clause as they treat all other main clauses. It is only when the reader hits the second main clause that the brain can react to it as a compound. One could, of course, count the first main clause as a clause in a compound. Be sure that students know whether or not you want them to count them.

6. What percent of non-initial main clauses (i.e., 2nd, 3rd, etc. in compound sentences) begins with a coordinating conjunction? With a colon" A semi-colon? A dash? [This one is better reserved for ninth grade. Students will probably not find these punctuation marks used correctly in their own writing, but their analysis of passages from their reading should provide data that would reinforce the teacher's instruction. And it might even be carried over into the students' writing in tenth grade.

7. What is the percent of initial main clauses (i.e., sentences) that begin with a coordinating conjunction? [This will kill the rule about not starting a sentence with "And" or "But."]
 

See "But Don't Begin a Sentence with 'But'"

Tenth Grade and Beyond

     Having spent three years on clauses, tenth graders would be ready to add gerunds, gerundives, and appositives to their statistical projects. Some questions that could be considered are:

1. What is the percentage of gerunds (gerundives, and/or appositives) per main clause. (Divide the total number of gerunds, gerundives or appositives by the total number of main clauses.)

2. What percent of gerunds function as direct objects? As objects of prepositions? As subjects?

3.. What is the average number of words per gerund, gerundive or appositive phrase? (In addition to counting the gerunds, gerundives and appositives, students would also have to count all the words which depend on each. In "My father, a teacher, hates to read." the appositive phrase consists of  two words. In "My father, a teacher of English, hates to read." the phrase consists of four. This average will naturally increase with age/grade level, but it is also highly affected by reading habits. Some students in tenth grade will already have a good command of these constructions, but others will rarely use them. Thus it will be especially interesting to have students analyze not just their own writing, but published writing as well. Newspaper writers, for example, are heavy users of these constructions.)

     The following suggestions, based on a decade of experience, may save teachers and students some frustration.

     For analyzing their own writing, have students use something they wrote in class; otherwise, you will have no idea of whose help/editing went into the paper. Be sure it is something that was written without any allusions by the teacher to grammar. (Otherwise, students will worry about grammar and may write shorter, safer sentences.)  Collect the writing at the end of the period, and write at least a few comments on each. Your handwriting on the original will identify it as such when you get it back later.

     If the students are old enough, return the papers to them, and make them create a typed copy, double-spaced. (If the students are using a word-processor, tell them to get the word-count from it.) The students should hand in the original with the typed version so that you can see that they are identical. If the students are younger, they will probably write less, and you may want to make the effort of creating typed copies (double-spaced).  The other option is to have the students make hand-written, ink copies, skipping lines.

     Next, have the students analyze their ink/typed copies as a homework assignment. TELL THEM TO DO THIS IN PENCIL, SINCE THEY WILL MAKE MISTAKES WHICH THEY WILL NEED TO ERASE.  Some of my students don't listen and do the analysis in pen. They soon end up with a mess and have to do it over again.

     When the assignment is due, have the class work in small groups, checking each other's work. While mine do this, I wander around the room, answering questions about any constructions which have caused confusion. After this class, I give students until the next class to make changes in the analysis or statistics.  The papers are collected the next class. I then check their analysis, make any necessary adjustments (for missed clauses, etc.), recalculate, if necessary, their results, calculate class averages, and return the papers. We then discuss the implications of the statistics, for example, what it means to have a high or low number of words per main clause.

     Teachers who are not familiar with spread-sheets will find them a fabulous tool for these calculations, even if they do not know how to use spread-sheets. (Tell someone at your school what you want to do, and they'll be able to set up a model for you in a matter of minutes. See Appendix 2.)
 

     In 1993, the Assembly on the Teaching of  English Grammar attempted to get a resolution onto the floor of an NCTE convention. The resolution urged NCTE to support research on the teaching of grammar. The resolution never made it to the floor. In the September 94 issue of Syntax in the Schools, Bill McCleary, founder and editor of Composition Chronicle, suggested that ATEG undertake research on its own. (Vol. 11, No. 1: "Grammar is Not Alone: The 'Conspiracy' Against Explicit Teaching about Language Structures")

     When I discussed this idea with several members of ATEG, we decided that the group is both too small and too diverse to undertake such a project. For the time being, therefore, Rose Parisella Productions will serve as a collecting point for research studies and related bibliographies. The idea is to make studies, etc. available on computer disks, so that they can be shared (including the original data, i.e., copies of the students' writing). I will be placing some studies there, and I hope others will join me. A listing of what is there will be available on request. For more information, write to RPP, 30 Marvin Circle, Williamsport, PA 17701.

     What fascinates me in these statistical projects is not just the results, but even more the learning and self-realization that takes place in students as they do it. For one thing, students find  many of their own errors. They regularly come up to me and say, "I can't find a subject in this sentence," or "This sentence is just a subordinate clause with no main clause." They also find and want to correct errors in subject/verb agreement. (You'll probably face the question: "Can I fix it before I do the calculations?")

     But beyond the errors, they begin to note stylistic differences. Usually I have at least one student, sometimes more, who says, "I can't find any subordinate clauses in my writing." And there aren't any. During the small-group session, this student hears someone call out to me (it almost always happens), "Sue has three brackets at the end of this sentence! Can that be right." And it usually is. And so we get into stylistic questions -- what does it mean to the reader when a text has no subordinate clauses? When it has level three embeddings?  And since each student has the results of his or her self-analysis, each student can see how the discussion is relevant. For some students, this analysis is reassuring -- their writing is better than they thought. For others, it is an eye-opener -- they can see for the first time how their writing syntactically differs from that of their classmates.

     As noted previously, conducting such a project may be frustrating for teachers. The primary problem is that most students cannot identify subjects and verbs in their own writing, much less clauses. Interestingly, there are even some members of the Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar who don't believe that students need to be able to make these identifications. Apparently, they believe that teaching students the rules and the definitions should suffice. But it does not. Rules and definitions are meaningless unless students are able to apply them. It is practical application that liberates students, liberates them both from the teacher, and from their inability to understand documents such as that on the cover of this book.