Monthly Archives: November 2006

Sentence Clinic Cures End of Semester Blues

At ten o’clock at night in the second to last week of class, I feel as bone-tired as my bleary-eyed students. Strangely, though, I cannot wait for my Friday class. Why? We play SENTENCE CLINIC tomorrow.

Write down two sentences from your paper or journals we will discuss today:

1. A sentence that you think worked well, one that makes you feel proud (Why do you like this sentence?)
2. A sentence that never quite worked, one that we will look at in the sentence clinic (Why do you think this sentence does not work?)

Tonight, chuckling to myself, I devour their responses. They LOVE their good sentences, and they know exactly why they are good: flow, analysis, emphasis, brevity, strong verbs, complexity, and clarity, precisely capturing an idea. My students revel in their best sentences. They have worked hard all semester, draft after draft, paper after paper, workshop after workshop, conference after conference, and their pride shines as they write:

I think this sentence perfectly demonstrates how succinctness, brevity, and lack of “to be” verbs creates a coherent, flowing, sentence.

Additionally, it does not contain any code words like important, vital, essential, etc; it rather specifies what makes the situation so.

I like it mainly because it took me a long time and a lot of effort to get it to sound quite right. I think it flows well, doesn’t include any “to be” verbs, and lays the outline for my paper perfectly. It’s a complex sentence and expresses specifically everything that my paper will talk about. It addresses the characters directly and gives specific proof.

This is also a sentence where I am “analyzing,” and we all know how important analyzing is (especially with Mrs. B!)

I think this sentence flows and I like the content conveyed in it.

It is the final sentence of one of my body paragraphs from my P&P essay and I think it brings the paragraph together really well with good grammar and no “to be” verbs.

I like this sentence because it is my first ‘love it’ from Mrs B. The sentence itself is not very extraordinary except for six words that I used within it to describe Elizabeth’s feelings for Mr Darcy.

But, oh—they loved to hate their bad sentences so:

First of all, there’s a dangling participle. The second clause of the sentence is placed next to “talents” but it isn’t describing talents, it’s describing Mr. Woodhouse’s behavior. Secondly, it contains a “to be” verb (“all that is good”). It also, begins, instead of ends, with new information. And finally, I just don’t like the way it sounds.

This sentence is bad because the known information should be at the beginning of the sentence, but it’s not.

The structure of this sentence and its resulting length render it unclear and awkward. . . The ending of the sentence seems so wordy and strangely ordered that it just does not sound harmonious when reading it out loud or to myself.

First of all, semicolon. Second of all, my participle doesn’t agree with the whole sentence. Third, I wrote pretend and intend in the same sentence. Re-reading this, I was wondering what I was thinking. This sentence needs to go to the sentence clinic.

Not counting their summer journal, they post their 22nd journal entry tonight on SEGUE before midnight. Tomorrow, we will tackle the sentences that have arrived bruised and bleeding to the clinic, but as I read the online journals tonight, I marvel at both how much my students have learned and how playful they can still be at this point of the semester. As I sit here, with the computer warm in my lap, I wait for each entry to drop until all fifteen have responded by midnight. Their on-line entries motivate and challenge me. In less than twelve hours, the sentence doctors will show up for class, and I can’t wait to teach them again.

Building a Better Beginning

Teaching a first-year seminar affords faculty the opportunity to explore their interests and expertise and to connect with first-year students in a way usually associated only with senior-level work. Part of the challenge of teaching a first-year seminar is balancing the seminar’s distinctive blend of subject matter, writing instruction, and advising. As faculty members teaching these courses, we often struggle to find the time to fit together the content we love, the writing goals we know are essential, and the advising moments vital to the academic lives of our students. The trick to finding the time for so many worthy goals is not to have the three aspects of the seminar compete with each other, but rather to have them work together. For the last two years, I have found a way to begin to do this even before a single first-year student has arrived on campus.
As advisors, first-year seminar faculty get to know their students well in a matter of weeks. I wanted to speed up the process and get to know my advisees before they came to campus. Thanks to Middlebury College’s own course-management tool, SEGUE, the students in my last two “Jane Austen and Film” seminars learned about each other, discussed the content of our course, and displayed their writing skills on line before they packed their bags and left home.
Because of the ease of the SEGUE interface and because most of the entering first-years are computer savvy, my instructions for entering the on-line discussion were brief:
Log onto our segue site with your Middlebury user name and password. Once you are on the Segue site, click on Summer Assignment, click discuss, and then new post, and then you can type in the box or upload a file with your response. After you have responded yourself, check back and try responding to two other students’ responses.
In early August, I wrote to my students (both by e-mail and by snail mail), and asked them to respond on line to four questions before they came to campus, and to respond to each other’s answers before they came to class. The questions ranged from academic to personal. Here are the questions I asked this year:

1. Tell us what you know about Jane Austen. Do you know anything about her life or when she wrote? If you don’t know anything about her, that’s fine–just say so. Why was Jane Austen & Film one of your first-year seminar choices?
2. Which novels by Jane Austen have you read before? Did you read them in school? On your own? As part of a book group or club? If so, which of the novels did you like best, or find most entertaining or provocative? Why? If you have never read a Jane Austen novel before, tell us another novel that you like or that you have found entertaining or provocative, and why.
3. Have you seen any of the film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels? Have you seen any modern film adaptation of Austen novels, such as Clueless or Bridget Jones’s Diary, or Bride and Prejudice? If so, which did you like best, or which did you find most entertaining or provocative? Why? If you have never seen an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, tell us another film that you like or that you have found entertaining or provocative, and why.
4. Now tell us a bit about yourself. Where do you come from, and how did you end up coming to Middlebury? How would a family member, close friend, special teacher or mentor describe you? What are some subjects you want to study at Middlebury? What are your interests and passions outside of class? What do you wish you could bring with you to Middlebury that you cannot bring? Tell us anything else you want about yourself that will help us get to know you better.

The three-week electronic discussion that followed these questions revealed students’ prior knowledge of Jane Austen and prior knowledge of film and novel genres as well as their academic aspirations and personal interests. From across the country and around the world, my students debated the merits of the 1995 and the 2005 film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and vowed to attend each other’s games and to debate each other about politics, the NFL and Keira Knightley’s performance when they hit campus. While students posted with each other, I wrote to them on our course blog, where I was able to track them checking in on our blog from across the globe. ja6map.jpg
This year, reading my students’ comments allowed me time to make changes in my syllabus and move some of my film showings around because I knew which Jane Austen novels most of my students had read in advance. My students’ 59 summer posts helped make our class a community before any of us met face to face. Now that we have put faces to names, our discussions about Jane Austen, writing and life continue in the classroom, in my office, over a movie, in the dorms, and yes, they continue on line, too.