Christopher Beha: On Making Sentences Do Something

http://www.themillions.com/2012/08/the-marquise-went-out-at-five-oclock-on-the-form-and-function-of-sentences.html

The Marquise Went out at Five O’clock: On Making Sentences Do Something

By CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA

"My own experience as a teacher has been that students are initially resistant to writing exercises, which they see as an infringement upon their self-expression. They are likely to be impatient if you suggest that these exercises will actually give them the tools necessary for self-expression, let alone that great writing might not even have that much to do with self-expression, in the end. But if you push them on it, if you set them to specific tasks, they will see improvement almost immediately and thus be encouraged to persist. I have had students admit to a great feeling of relief at being given an assignment at which they could succeed because even though they were certain that they wanted to write, they didn’t yet know what they wanted to write, and learning both the how and the what of writing at once is an overwhelming task. "