One reason was that a few studies indicated that the gains in student writing
produced by sentence combining disappeared over time (Callaghan, 1978;
Green, 1973; Sullivan, 1978). Another, more compelling, reason was that com-
position theory had shifted pedagogy from bottom-up methods to top-down.
The new focus was on process and producing whole essays. Also, at about this
same time, there was a dramatic shift toward personal experience writing, a
shift that seems to have been motivated, in part, by a desire among educators to
avoid the inevitable sorting associated with increased competition (see Wil-
liams, 2003a). There really isn’t much a teacher can evaluate in a personal ex-
perience essay, for we can’t realistically claim that one person’s experiences
are somehow better than another’s. We can address issues of style, of course,
but style is poorly understood and seldom taught. Moreover, stylistic features
cluster in sentences and paragraphs, the very structures that receive little
attention in the process-oriented classroom.
More recently, Connors (2000) suggested that dismissal of work at the sen-
tence level may have been hasty and that the techniques of phrasal modification
and sentence combining can provide valuable composing tools. I would add that,
if nothing else, these techniques can help students make their writing more varied
and interesting very quickly. It may well be the case that our implementation of
process pedagogy led us to throw the baby out with the bath water, as it were.
96 CHAPTER 3