College Composition and Communication Sep 2000

The Erasure of the Sentence

Robert J. Connors

Abstract

This article examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s—the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining—and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. The usefulness of these sentence-based rhetorics was never disproved, but a growing wave of anti-formalism, anti-behaviorism, and anti-empiricism within English-based composition studies after 1980 doomed them to a marginality under which they still exist today. The result of this erasure of sentence pedagogies is a culture of writing instruction that has very little to do with or to say about the sentence outside of a purely grammatical discourse.

Journal
College Composition and Communication
Published
2000-09-01
DOI
10.58680/ccc20001409
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
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Citation context

Cited by in this index (6)

  1. Aull (2025)
    What’s Grammar Got to Do with It? Judging Less and Learning More in Encounters …
    College English
  2. Slagle (2025)
    Effort is All You Need: The Possibilities of Writing Analytics
    Journal of Writing Analytics
  3. McNamara (2018)
    Diminishing Returns at Corporate U: Chinese Undergraduates and Composition’s Ac…
    Literacy in Composition Studies
  4. McNamara (2018)
    Diminishing Returns at Corporate U: Chinese Undergraduates and Composition’s Ac…
    Literacy in Composition Studies
  5. Walker (2015)
    Composing Agency: Theorizing the Readiness Potentials of Literacy Practices
    Literacy in Composition Studies
Show all 6 →
  1. Walker (2015)
    Composing Agency: Theorizing the Readiness Potentials of Literacy Practices
    Literacy in Composition Studies

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