Teaching the Sentence and Being Up-front with Students

“And so how can we be prescriptive when we know that professional writers create paragraphs that ignore these models...We can because despite the limits of these models, they do give students a structure with which to create coherent paragraphs”(247) 

Our task is to teach mechanics who may someday be artists. Once the limiting rules are mastered, they can be transcended, but only those who know the law can afford to live without it. If you are honest with your students about the limitations of the rules you set, you need never apologize for being prescriptive”(247)

A few years ago, I was tutoring a high school senior and we were working on paragraph structure, topic sentences and supporting detail. Admittedly, I was using a “fill in the box” type hand out that was on the tutoring company’s website-I felt as if I was being condescending to her, but the company wanted to make sure we were using their selected material. I decided I would use their material, but not this specific handout.   But for the short time I was using this hand out, I wanted to be careful about what went inside the boxes; I felt that when I turned them in, they would not only prove that I was in fact using the company’s material but that I was complying to traditional ideas of composition. I wanted to be careful, so I had the student transcribe her finished paragraph on notebook paper before we filled in the boxes.

   One day, we were filling in the boxes and she asked: “Can you start a sentence with ‘but’?” I said yes, you can; but then I qualified that statement , saying that professional writers can do that because they know the rules-they know what they’re doing. It felt like such a cop out.  Even though her sentence made sense by beginning with “but,” I didn’t want that go inside the box: the administrator who checked the handouts was not likely an English professional, but beginning a sentence with a conjunction would seem like such a glaring and obvious mistake , regardless if it made sense within the paragraph. 

I don’t want to cop out or confuse students; but do they need to grasp mechanics before artistry, one before the other, or simultaneously?