INTRODUCTION

Students are not machines. And students using machines not machines using students should be the aim of our teaching. Teachers are not machines, either. Teachers use machines to write with. We have not been taught by machines to write, but we do use machines to help us to write better. Such a machine is the computer, and writing better is something the computer can help us to do. Why? It helps because writing well, especially the kind of writing demanded by schools, means re-writing. Genuine re-writing means re-vision, re-seeing the ideas that find their expression on the page. Previous technology allowed us to re-see what we had written, but the technology represented by the computer allows us easily to re-see and to see again through re-writing the ideas that we have re-visioned. Teachers use machines this way; why should teachers teach students to use them differently?

Many of the ideas that we have revised find their expression in new sentence forms: more complex sentences often indicate more complex thought. Certainly, through the process of re-writing, our sentences can become more beautiful. And complexity and beauty are often convincing, often as persuasive as the force of our ideas, their logical expression, and their supporting details. Often we are drawn to a writer not because we agree with the writer's ideas but because of the writer's style. Like so much in life, beauty is more compelling than utility.

It is my belief that it is style more than anything else that attracts us to a writer. Whether or not you share my belief, I think you will find that completing these ten exercises will give you an increased appreciation for sentence style and that many of these writing exercises will help you express your ideas in a form that readers will find attractive.

• For these writing exercises to be successful, when you complete the course you should be writing in a stylistically involved manner, a sentence style that matches the sense of what you are expressing.
• You should have developed an appreciation for different sentence styles and how style influences thought.
• You should be more aware of how form influences content and be able to analyze the form of sentences as well as the form of developed themes.
• You should be comfortable with the challenges posed by more complex writing assignments, assignments such as research paper writing and literary or other textual analysis.
• You should be adept at analyzing your own writing style.
• You should have become experienced with many of the functions of the computer word processor that have helped you overcome many of the self-censoring blocks to expressing your ideas; in other words, you have taken advantage of many of the computer functions that easily perform tasks that you may have previously been judged harshly on: spelling, basic grammatical constructions, verb tense agreement, etc.

Any technology presents to humans two distinct "faces." We can view the computer as a threat or a liberation. We can use the computer to re-enforce bad teaching or to promote good teaching. Using the computer to take over the punitive, judgmental functions that label, categorize, and separate the "good" students from the "bad" is simply to increase oppression for students and remove students from the utilization of writing as communication of what matters in a manner that appeals to the readers' better instincts.

Return to the Preface

Go to Introductory Note on Sentence Style

Go to Exercise One

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