The Loss of Formalism-- Connors & Christensen

Connors presents a compelling overview of the rise and fall of sentence-based rhetoric pedagogy as it played out in the world of composition teaching. He focuses on Christensen's "Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence" ( the 2nd reading for today), along with imitation exercises and sentence-combining. These theories combined to make up the most commonly accepted teaching methods in composition from the 60s until the 80s. As Connors points out, the theories on sentence rhetoric were not suddenly attacked or disproved. Opposing anti-formalism and anti-behaviorism arguments existed from the beginning and slowly took over the conversation over time. In a world where we rarely hear any positive opinions of formalism, it was very interesting to read this report and see how effective and valuable these techniques were in the day, and how (at least in Connor's opinion), they still could be if we'd let them back into the conversation.

Christensen's view was that if people could learn to write good sentences, they would be better writers over all. He started with short base-level sentences and had students attach initial and final modifying clauses and phrases, allowing them to create "cumulative sentences." He aimed to build their syntactic dexterity.

This formal vs. anti-formal conversation is one I have had in most all of my classes on teaching ESL. Christensen's method would be called "bottom-up" teaching, as opposed to Chomsky "top-down" approach, in which people do not need to be taught forms and structures because they were born with universal grammar knowledge and all of that knowledge will be developed with exposure and practice. My opinion has been and continues to be that bottom-up and top-down both need to be present in language classrooms, and I think the same could be said in composition teaching. I think that the conversation about syntactic rhetoric teaching is an important one to bring back into the light as we think about what skills our students need to become mature, developed writers.