The Writing Revolution

precision in writing, they had fewer complex ideas, or they had ideas like the sentences they wrote, predictable, neither compound nor complex. What might have been a skein of thought was instead a litter of short, broken threads, each with a subject-verb-object construction. Hockman's solution was regular, intentional exercises to expand students' syntactic range. You could ask them to practice expanding their sentences in specific and methodical ways, and they'd get better at it. Crucially, she pointed out, this must be done in a content-rich environment because the content drives the rigor. Sentences needed ideas pressing outward from inside them to stretch and expand their limits. Only rich content gave them a reason to seek and achieve nuance. One example of a Hockman sentence expansion exercise was called Because, But, So. The idea was deceptively simple. You gave students a sentence stem and then asked them to expand it three different ways, with the common conjunctions because, but, and so. This would help them to see each sentence as constantly expandable, and it would, as Hockman writes in this book, prod them to think critically and deeply about the content they were studying, far more so than if you simply ask them to write a sentence in answer to an open-ended question. It would build their ability to conjoin ideas with fluidity. It would help them to understand, through constant theme and variation, the broader concepts of subordination and coordination. I want to pause here to digress on the seemingly underwhelming concepts of coordination and subordination. I will ask you to stifle your yawn as I acknowledge that they are easy to dismiss, ancient, faintly risible, uttered once long ago by acolytes of sentence diagramming in the era of chalk dust. They smack of grammar for grammar's sake, and almost nobody cares about that. Teachers instead seek mostly to simply make sure the sentences work and dispense with the parsing of parts. It is so much simpler to tell kids to go with sounds right, an idea that inherently discriminates against those for whom the sounds of language are not happily ingrained by luck or privilege, or to make the odd episodic correction and not worry about the principle at work. But coordination and subordination are, in fact, deeply powerful principles worth mastering. They describe the ways that ideas are connected, the nuances that yoke disparate thoughts together. It is the connections as much as the ideas that make meaning. To master conjunctions is to be able to express that two ideas are connected, but that one is more important than the other, that one is dependent on the other, that one is contingent on the other, that the two ideas exist in contrast or conflict. Mastering that skill is immensely important, not just to writing, but to reading. Students who struggle with complex text can usually understand the words and clauses of a sentence. It is the piecing together of the interrelationships among them that most often poses the problem. They understand the first half of the sentence, but miss the cue that questions its veracity in the second half. And so, without mastery of the syntax of relationships, which is what coordination and subordination are, the sentence devolves, for weak readers, into meaninglessness. For weeks, I reflected on the power of these simple activities for teachers and students, but my reflections were not limited to my role as an educator. As a father, I was intrigued as well, and I suppose this is the truest test of an educational idea.