Ooh-la-la!
Yesterday I shared a passage from Bruce Catton, a description of the Army of the Potomac the night before the Battle of Antietam that made me go, "Ooh-la-la!" when I first read it. But aside from my lascivious sentence-lust, I want to consider the practical problem of what to do when you want to share some "Ooh-la-la" writing with your students. Let's take the first two sentences of Catton's passage as an example:
So the first thing we have to decide is what concrete, teachable features in the writing we should focus our energy on. Is it punctuation? You could do that: erase all the commas and ask them where the commas go. But it's not the punctuation that makes the passage worth reading. That has more to do with the words themselves. So should we do a vocabulary lesson? Trajectory looks sexy in an SAT kind of way, but there's not much beyond that one word.
So what is happening within these sentences that gives them such power? Well, the passage owes its power to Catton's sudden shift from what many (though not me) would regard as a rather dry narration of battlefield movements into this reflective, poetic mode, which he achieves by adding phrases to the sentence core. In Between the Commas, I argue that it's the addition of such modifying phrases that make such powerful writing possible, and that English teachers need to know what these phrases are if they are to teach writing in a way that makes growth possible for their students.
For example, the first sentence, a fifty-five word affair composed of two independent clauses of 30 and 25 words respectively, starts with the subject-verb core at the head, and continues on with three prepositional phrases (the first two bound together rather than separated with a comma) before pausing with a semi-colon. It then resumes, again with the subject-verb core at the head, followed by two bound (no comma) prepositional phrases ("from the rumpled grass...down to a fence"), a bound adjective clause modifying "thicket" ("where there would be an appointment") and finally a powerful absolute phrase ("the...trajectory of the man meeting the...trajectory of the bullet"), which in my classroom goes by the name "the Sentence Wannabe."
Now I noted Catton's lack of commas here and there, not to complicate the issue of punctuation, but to warn you off the temptation to make this a punctuation exercise. The truth is that in some of those spots you could correctly place commas, or, as Catton does, you could leave them out, rolling the phrases together into a longer phrase. In other words, there are no hard and fast rules for commas in sentences like this. The issue of comma placement is so dependent on the context of the sentence and the preference of the writer that if you tried to lead a lesson on such things, you would soon find yourself reaching the point of diminishing returns.
It's far better, I think, to focus on Catton's use of phrase additions, any of which could be applied with a comma. In this example, the additions are a combination prepositional and verbal phrases (“leaving” and “going,” which in my classroom we call “-ingbombs”), and finally that Wannabe at the end of the second sentence.
When I want to introduce such things to my students, I try as much as possible to begin with the idea that they already know how to use these additions. This can be done with the use of Manipulative Sentence Scrambles, an exercise that draws its inspiration partly from Donald and Dorothy Killgallon's brilliant Sentence Composing book series and also from those found poetry magnets you see on people's refrigerators.
The idea is to take an "Ooh-La-La" Sentence and divide it into grammatical chunks, based on where commas could go (whether or not the writer has done so). Type them up in such a way that the paper can be cut into pieces, one piece per grammatical chunk. Keep it manageable, limiting each sentence to 5 to 8 chunks. (I print mine on card stock so that I can re-use them each year.) Then cut the papers up by the chunk and have the students see if they can re-assemble the sentence into their original form. Here's what it mine look like:
Notice that I've made three or four sets per page; as a classroom teacher, I'm always trying to save paper. I cut across at the solid lines first before trimming everything down to actual card sets. Once I've cut and clipped the pages into sets, I have the students work in pairs to re-assemble the sentences. Often I find that many will create sentences that are not the same as the original, but grammatically sound. Congratulate these students. They're proving their chops with English grammar. Compare these variations with the original and discuss with the class what might be the different semantic or rhetorical effects in such differences in phrase placement.
When you introduce such things this way, you are tapping into students' schema, beginning with what they already know--even if they didn't know that they know it. The issue of grammar becomes much less threatening this way.
- "How far they had marched, those soldiers--down the lanes and cross-lots over the cornfield to get into position, and from the distance corners of the country before that; they were marching, really, out of one era and into another, leaving much behind them, going ahead to much that they did not know about.
- For some of them there were just a few steps left: from the rumpled grass of a bed in a pasture down to a fence or a thicket where there would be an appointment with a flying bullet or shell fragment, the miraculous and infinitely complicated trajectory of the man meeting the flat, whining trajectory of the bullet without fail."
So the first thing we have to decide is what concrete, teachable features in the writing we should focus our energy on. Is it punctuation? You could do that: erase all the commas and ask them where the commas go. But it's not the punctuation that makes the passage worth reading. That has more to do with the words themselves. So should we do a vocabulary lesson? Trajectory looks sexy in an SAT kind of way, but there's not much beyond that one word.
So what is happening within these sentences that gives them such power? Well, the passage owes its power to Catton's sudden shift from what many (though not me) would regard as a rather dry narration of battlefield movements into this reflective, poetic mode, which he achieves by adding phrases to the sentence core. In Between the Commas, I argue that it's the addition of such modifying phrases that make such powerful writing possible, and that English teachers need to know what these phrases are if they are to teach writing in a way that makes growth possible for their students.
For example, the first sentence, a fifty-five word affair composed of two independent clauses of 30 and 25 words respectively, starts with the subject-verb core at the head, and continues on with three prepositional phrases (the first two bound together rather than separated with a comma) before pausing with a semi-colon. It then resumes, again with the subject-verb core at the head, followed by two bound (no comma) prepositional phrases ("from the rumpled grass...down to a fence"), a bound adjective clause modifying "thicket" ("where there would be an appointment") and finally a powerful absolute phrase ("the...trajectory of the man meeting the...trajectory of the bullet"), which in my classroom goes by the name "the Sentence Wannabe."
Now I noted Catton's lack of commas here and there, not to complicate the issue of punctuation, but to warn you off the temptation to make this a punctuation exercise. The truth is that in some of those spots you could correctly place commas, or, as Catton does, you could leave them out, rolling the phrases together into a longer phrase. In other words, there are no hard and fast rules for commas in sentences like this. The issue of comma placement is so dependent on the context of the sentence and the preference of the writer that if you tried to lead a lesson on such things, you would soon find yourself reaching the point of diminishing returns.
It's far better, I think, to focus on Catton's use of phrase additions, any of which could be applied with a comma. In this example, the additions are a combination prepositional and verbal phrases (“leaving” and “going,” which in my classroom we call “-ingbombs”), and finally that Wannabe at the end of the second sentence.
When I want to introduce such things to my students, I try as much as possible to begin with the idea that they already know how to use these additions. This can be done with the use of Manipulative Sentence Scrambles, an exercise that draws its inspiration partly from Donald and Dorothy Killgallon's brilliant Sentence Composing book series and also from those found poetry magnets you see on people's refrigerators.
The idea is to take an "Ooh-La-La" Sentence and divide it into grammatical chunks, based on where commas could go (whether or not the writer has done so). Type them up in such a way that the paper can be cut into pieces, one piece per grammatical chunk. Keep it manageable, limiting each sentence to 5 to 8 chunks. (I print mine on card stock so that I can re-use them each year.) Then cut the papers up by the chunk and have the students see if they can re-assemble the sentence into their original form. Here's what it mine look like:
When you introduce such things this way, you are tapping into students' schema, beginning with what they already know--even if they didn't know that they know it. The issue of grammar becomes much less threatening this way.
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