The materials presented in this appendix are those that I have used or continue to use with college Freshmen. They can, of course, be adapted for use with students at different grade levels. Feel free to use them.

     My students do not use a grammar or handbook --: in fact, I discourage them from doing so. Most such books make the rules of grammar more complicated than they actually are, and the sentences used in them as examples or as exercises are much too simplistic to be of any help. 

     The most difficult part of enabling college Freshmen to analyze the structure of their own sentences is in getting them to recognize prepositional phrases: years of learning and studying grammar have led them to believe that the study is not worth the effort. I can't blame them, but their attitude did cause a major problem. Getting prepositional phrases out of the way is a major first step in the analysis of a sentence. The next two pages present a handout that I found useful. Lately, I have not used it. 

     Instead, my students work with a computer program, developed partially under a Title III grant at Pennsylvania College of Technology, which teaches them to recognize these phrases as well as basic S/V/C patterns. I am continuing to develop the program, and plan on selling it.

     On the day the program is due, or thereabouts, I devote one class period to a computerized, psycholinguistic model of the reading process. The model presents George Miller's concept of Short-Term Memory, and it shows how humans can process sentences through a seven-slot STM by chunking words into phrases, phrases into clauses, etc. EVERYTHING WE DO WITH GRAMMAR IS THEN RELATED TO THIS PSYCHOLINGUISTIC MODEL: it justifies all the rules.

     The next step in the process is the analysis of sentences.  I usually give the students four pages of dittos, double spaced, three of which are excerpts from students' essays. (The fourth is the sentence on the cover of this book.) Their instructions are to analyze the handouts for prepositional phrases and for S/V/C patterns. We spend the next three or four classes going over these handouts. At the beginning of the first class, I give students the handout on Subordinate Clauses (given here on the page after the prepositional phrase handout). Although the students were only supposed to find prepositional phrases and S/V/C patterns, we immediately start analyzing clauses. I have an overhead of each handout, and, as students tell me what to do, I mark the phrases, the S/V/C patterns, and bracket the clauses and insert the vertical lines. Since most students are not accustomed to systematic thinking (or work), it takes a period or two before most students catch on. But those who try, do catch on. During these classes, I give two quizzes. In the first, I simply ask for the definition of a clause. (Students are warned that this quiz is coming, and they are told that it is an all-or-nothing quiz, i.e., I expect to see that a clause is "a S/V/C pattern and all the words that chunk to it," not necessarily in those words.) In the other quiz, I give the students a sentence to analyze. I grade the quiz; I do not grade their work on the handouts, although sometimes I have done so, basing the grade only on how much of the handout they have done.

     Following the analysis of the handouts, students are required to analyze a passage from their own writing. I give them about a week to do this, during which time, in class, I bring in examples of sentences to discuss various errors and various stylistic questions. When their self-analysis is due, we spend a class period working in groups, so that they can check each other's work and ask questions about problems they ran into. The following period, I collect their analyses. I compute statistical averages for the class and give each student the numbers for the class and for their own work. We then spend a period summarizing what we have done, with special emphasis on the implications of words per and subordinate clauses per main clause.

     Because of this work on syntax, later in the semester I feel very comfortable discussing sentence structure, either in class or with individual students. (Questions usually arise in relation to thesis or topic sentences.) In grading the students' major papers, I do something else. I deduct one or two penalty points for every comma-splice, run-on, fragment, or other grammatical error which can be understood in terms of the analysis we have done in class. Students can get these points back by analyzing the sentence which contains the error. (They hand in the original paper, with parentheses, brackets, etc. in the offending sentences.) If the analysis is correct, the students get back the points. If it is not, the student can get the points by coming to me to discuss the sentences. Some students, of course, are irresponsible and simply don't care. But many students do, and since I have been using this system, many students have thanked me. Until then, they had not realized that all those red marks on their papers were really just one or two errors frequently repeated. Now, they can understand the problem, and because they can get the points back, they are motivated, first, to fix the errors, and second, to avoid them in the future.

     In a college composition course, I only go as far as clauses -- we do not deal with verbals or the other constructions. But because we use the psycholinguistic model and constantly refer to how the brain connects one phrase to another, students can also understand the problems caused by dangling and misplaced modifiers. Altogether, I spend about three weeks, or one-fifth of the course, on syntax. I wish I did not have to -- there are a lot of other things students need to learn about writing. But students who cannot control sentences cannot control either a thesis or a topic sentence. And students who already have control of sentences usually improve. It is not unusual, for example, to hear a good student writer say, "If I'm writing for this audience, perhaps I should lighten up on subordinate clauses." 
 

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