Why Sentence Combining Works
The goal of writing instruction is to equip students to clearly and elegantly express their ideas. The Common Core aspires to “the development and organization of ideas” — this requires a mastery of syntax-manipulation.
We created Quill Connect, our platform for digital sentence-combining activities, using research-based evidence that sentence combining exercises are the most effective way to build syntax-manipulation skills. In a sentence-combining exercise, students are given two complete sentences and asked to combine them into one clear, interesting sentence. In Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Dr. Bruce Saddler draws on “more than 80 studies” that “have demonstrated with few exceptions that sentence combining is an effective method” (Saddler 240). He then gives us a useful case study.
At the beginning of the school year, Ms. Asaro’s second-grade students exhibited two main struggles in sentence-writing: repetitive subject-verb-object structure on one end of the spectrum (eg: ‘The student walked. She walked quickly. She was late for class.’), and awkward run-on sentences on the other (eg: ‘The student walked, she walked quickly, she was late for class.’).
To combat these issues, Ms. Asaro began by projecting a pair of sentences that were as similar as possible — “The dog is little” and “The dog jumped high” — and the , and opened a classwide dialogue about how the two sentences could be combined. She then arranged her class into pairs, and moved into oral practice, as well as paired writing activities in which students would work together to combine two kernel sentences.
Sentence combining taught these students to view writing as a tinkering process; the exercises “parallel what writers actually do when refining their text” in a way that other exercises do not, encouraging them to “combine, change, add, rearrange, and delete words and ideas.” Through this process, students learn that more than one combination could be correct, which empowers students to make decisions, and teaches them that mistakes are opportunities for adjustment and learning. It also allows students to develop their own style of writing; two different authors might express the same thought in two completely unique ways, and both of them could represent a clear expression.
Ms. Asaro’s class showed measurable improvement in two important areas of focus. First, the students made less errors of punctuation, which resulted in fewer run-on sentences and sentence fragments. But Ms. Asaro’s students were able to create writing that was more than just grammatically sound; the overall quality of their stories rose. With their newfound ability to vary sentence structure, students created stories that flowed with a “satisfying rhythm.”
These findings inspired us to create Quill Connect, the first self-grading sentence connecting activity in which students write full sentences. Quill Connect allows students the appropriate practice of actually writing and rewriting sentences, while helping teachers cut down on grading time. Quill Connect helps teach students that there are many ways to combine any two sentences by accepting many different answers as correct, and by showing students alternative solutions each time they successfully combine a sentence.
(Source: Saddler, Bruce. “Best Practices in Sentence Construction Skills.” Best Practices in Writing Instruction, 2nd ed., The Guilford Press, 2013.)
