What Is Sentence Combining and How Does It Work?

Question: What Is Sentence Combining and How Does It Work?

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.

By cutting out the needless repetition and adding a few conjunctions, we can combine these three short sentences into a single, more coherent sentence. We might write this, for instance: "The dancer was not tall or slender, but she was extremely elegant." Or this: "The dancer was neither tall nor slender but extremely elegant." Or even this: "Neither tall nor slender, the dancer was extremely elegant nonetheless."

Which version is grammatically correct?

All three of them.

Then which version is most effective?

Now that's the right question. And the answer (as discussed in Introduction to Sentence Combining) depends on several factors, beginning with the context in which the sentence appears.

The Rise, Fall, and Return of Sentence Combining

As a method of teaching writing, sentence combining grew out of studies in transformational-generative grammar and was popularized in the 1970s by researchers and teachers such as Frank O'Hare (Sentence-Combining: Improving Student Writing Without Formal Grammar Instruction, 1971) and William Strong (Sentence Combining: A Composing Book, 1973). Around the same time, interest in sentence combining was heightened by other emerging sentence-level pedagogies, especially the "generative rhetoric of the sentence" advocated by Francis and Bonniejean Christensen (A New Rhetoric, 1976).

In recent years, after a period of neglect (a period when researchers, as Robert J. Connors has noted, "did not like or trust exercises" of any kind), sentence combining has made a comeback in many composition classrooms. Whereas in the 1980s, as Connors says, "it was no longer enough to report that sentence-combining 'worked' if no one could specify why it worked," research has now caught up with practice:

[T]he preponderance of writing instruction research shows that systematic practice in combining and expanding sentences may increase students' repertoire of syntactic structures and may also improve the quality of their sentences, when stylistic effects are discussed as well. Thus, sentence combining and expansion are viewed as a primary (and accepted) writing instructional approach, one that has emerged from research findings holding that a sentence combining approach is far superior to traditional grammar instruction.
(Carolyn Carter, The Absolute Minimum Any Educator Should Know & Teach Students About the Sentence, iUniverse, 2003)

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. Connors, originally published in the September 2000 issue of College Composition and Communication and reprinted in the third edition of Teaching Composition: Background Readings, edited by T.R. Johnson (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008).

Exercises in Sentence Building and Combining at About.com Grammar & Composition

The sentence building and combining exercises here at Grammar & Composition encourage students to experiment with different methods of putting words together:

• Sentence Building Exercises focus on particular grammatical structures in isolated sentences.
• Sentence Combining & Paragraph Building Exercises (sometimes called whole-discourse exercises) provide similar practice within the context of paragraphs and short essays.

Because there are countless ways to construct sentences, the goal is not to find the one "correct" combination but to consider different arrangements before deciding which one is most effective.

To begin developing your skills in sentence building and combining, follow these links:

Sentence Building Exercises:

1. An Introduction to Sentence Combining
2. Sentence Building With Adjectives and Adverbs
3. Sentence Building With Prepositional Phrases
4. Sentence Building With Coordinators
5. Sentence Building With Adjective Clauses
6. Sentence Building With Appositives
7. Sentence Building With Adverb Clauses
8. Sentence Building With Participial Phrases
9. Sentence Building With Absolutes
10. Sentence Building With Noun Phrases and Noun Clauses

Sentence Combining Exercises:

1. An Introduction to Sentence Combining
2. New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed
3. Martha's Departure
4. Nervous Norman
5. The San Francisco Earthquake
6. Rolling Along With Mr. Bill
7. Out of the Ice Age
8. How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading
9. Kazin's Kitchen
10. Mrs. Bridge
11. My Home of Yesteryear
12. Orwell's "A Hanging"
13. Sentence Recombining: Steinbeck's Flood