Sentence-Combining Exercises. The Basic Sentence. Unit One The Basic Sentence Download Word File Download PDF File Throughout this book, you will be combining sentences to practice ways to show logical relationships or to modify, or describe, words in sentences. This practice will help you to express your ideas in clear, concise, and varied sentences when you write college-level e essays. But first it helps to know what makes a sentence a sentence. Look at the following groups of words; which do you think are complete sentences? (a) Teenagers work. (b) Many teenagers work after school. (c) Many teenagers work after school to earn spending money. If you thought that all three are sentences, you are correct, because all three contain a subject-verb unit—a subject and verb working together. Teenagersworked. Teenagerswill work. Sentence (a) also has a subject, teenagers, a word that does the action in the verb.
Take a look at the following groups of words; which do you think are complete sentences? (a) They are. (b) They are students. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Combine Sentences | Teaching Excellence in Adult Literacy (TEAL) Sentence Combining: Teaching Rules of Sentence Structure by Doing. Students with poor writing skills often write sentences that lack 'syntactic maturity' (Robinson & Howell, 2008). That is, these writers' sentences often follow a simple, stereotyped format.
In public schools, grammar skills have traditionally been taught in isolation to give students the advanced writing knowledge required to master a diverse range of sentence structures. However, isolated grammar instruction appears to have little or no positive impact in helping poor writers become better writers (Graham & Perin, 2007). A promising alternative is to use sentence combining (Graham & Perin, 2007; Strong, 1986).
In a simple demonstration of sentence combining, a student may generate these two sentences in her composition on the American Revolution: The American army had few supplies in the winter of 1776. The instructor might meet with the student and have the student recopy the two sentences in this format: The American army had few supplies in the winter of 1776. References. Sentence Combining Page. Sentence Combining Often I will start off my sentence combining introduction by asking my class, “What makes a sentence a good sentence?” Or “What are the characteristics of a good sentence?” More often than not, I will be greeted by blank stares and confused looks, which is by no means unusual in my classes.
But I usually manage to wait them out until I get some response like, “Sentences are good if they are descriptive,” or “A sentence is a good sentence if it contains a complete thought.” What Is Sentence Combining and How Does It Work? - The Purpose and Methods of Sentence Combining - English Grammar. Answer: An alternative to traditional forms of grammar instruction, sentence combining gives students practice in manipulating a variety of basic sentence structures. Despite appearances, the goal of sentence combining is not to produce longer sentences but rather to develop more effective sentences--and to help students become more versatile writers. How Sentence Combining Works Here's a simple example of how sentence combining works. Consider these three short sentences: The dancer was not tall.The dancer was not slender.The dancer was extremely elegant.
Which version is grammatically correct? All three of them. Then which version is most effective? Now that's the right question. The Rise, Fall, and Return of Sentence Combining In recent years, after a period of neglect (a period when researchers, as Robert J. For more information about the rise, fall, and return of sentence combining (and other syntactic exercises), see "The Erasure of the Sentence" by Robert J. Sentence Building Exercises: 79.04.06: Sentence-Combining in Grade Eight. Sentence-combining is a process which all writers and other users of language employ either intuitively or upon review and revision. We join sentences unconsciously in both oral and written language.
Kellog Hunt writes-that sentence-combining takes one sentence of a certain sort and another of a certain sort and combines them to produce one new sentence. The process of combining little sentences into bigger ones can be repeated an indefinite number of times so that two, three, four, five, and even twenty can be combined into one complicated sentence.1 The joining of sentences partially indicates linguistic maturity. A student moves from the simple: I saw Spot. Spot was running, to the more complex: I saw Spot running. Sentence-combining practice produces students who write longer sentences, and thus express their linguistic maturity. Other experiments have been conducted. Students may also be turned off by traditional grammar instruction. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The canary was yellow.