As virtual civil war raged between Azerbaijanis and Armenians, the Kremlin on Monday declared a state of emergency and sent units of the Soviet army, navy and KGB security service to the troubled southern region, where the Kremlin said attempts were being made "to overthrow Soviet power."

-- Steve Goldstein, Knight-Ridder News Service

A sentence such as that above is never found in the essays of weak writers. Here is an example of the type of paper given a minimal rating on the National Assessment of Educational Progress:

I have been experience at cleaning house. I've also work at a pool be for. I love keeping things neat, organized, and clean. I'm very social I'll get to know peopl really fast. I never forget to do things.

Finding a well-crafted sentence like Goldstein's among the many papers rated Unsatisfactory or Minimal on the NAEP is less likely than spotting a polished diamond among chunks of anthracite hacked from an Appalachian coal mine. Viewing the link another way, any student who can devise and write such a sentence -- who can sort through the information, pinpoint relationships, and express the ideas syntactically -- has the thinking and writing skills needed to develop effective essays. One can hardly imagine a person writing such a sentence, yet being unable to write additional sentences to compose coherent paragraphs and papers. Such sentences are not bricks out of which buildings can be constructed but entire well-designed rooms reflecting mastery of materials and engineering which extends to broader applications as needed. This is confirmed by Mellon's finding that SC-test scores correlate highly with NAEP paper ratings.

One goal of SC exercises is to help students develop the reasoning and syntactical skills needed to write such sentences. SC aims to expand analytical ability from the level of simple-sentence thoughts to the capacity for comprehending, coordinating, and verbalizing relationships holding together many pieces of information.

Where SC has been properly used, it has proven beneficial. But because process-approach and WAC advocates have been so adamant and vocal in publicizing their procedures, many teachers are still relatively unacquainted with SC, and much work remains to be done developing good texts for all grade levels. This chapter extends Chapter 3 in discussing SC applications and issues.

Chapter 3 distinguished between cued and open SC. Cued exercises have built-in directions on how sentences should be combined -crossed out words should be deleted and capitalized words after sentences put in front, as in this example:

Officer Flubber collided with the tree out front. (AFTER . . .,)
Officer Flubber ran into the house. (HE . . .,)
Officer Flubber dived at the alleged thief. (. . .,)
Officer Flubber missed. (. . .,)
Officer Flubber sailed out the window. (AND)

After Officer Flubber collided with the tree out front, he ran into the house, dived at the alleged thief, missed, and sailed out the window.

By contrast, open exercises allow students options on combining, as in this exercise:

A writer with knowledge can find a job writing brochures.
The writer is skillful.
The knowledge is technical.
He or she can always find a job.
The job is high paying.
The brochures are commercial.
He or she may also write operating manuals.
This fact was reported in a newspaper article.

According to a newspaper article, a skillful writer with technical knowledge can always find a high-paying job writing commercial brochures and operating manuals.

While open exercises give students options on how they combine sentences, textbooks using them generally do not leave students without instructions and guidance. Patterns and examples for combining sentences are usually presented in the text before the exercises.

For example, in Style and Readability in Technical Writing, the first chapter is entitled "Combining with Addition/Deletion" and shows students examples of adding adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases before asking them to combine sentences such as these:

The electrical arc produces light.
The arc is in a fluorescent tube.
The light is ultraviolet.
The ultraviolet light is invisible.

The electrical arc in a fluorescent tube produces invisible ultraviolet light.

The second chapter, entitled "Combining with the Wh-Connection," shows how information is added with who, whose, which, whom, and that. The third chapter shows how to handle appositives and, after several simpler exercises, lets students use everything learned so far to combine these sentences into one or two paragraphs.

The New Fuels

Thus a student's ability to handle an increasing number of ideas and transformations is strengthened gradually.

Chapter 3 cites Argall's study in which students given intensive SC work showed significant decreases in garbled sentences, comma splices, sentence fragments, and other grammatical errors. Considering the nature of SC exercises, this is understandable. In SC students not only learn sentence patterns, but each time they write a combined sentence they are writing -- from a model -- correct spellings, subjectverb combinations, and other elements of usage.

Another attraction of SC is that it sidesteps the problem encountered in the process approach of students having nothing to write about, expressed in this excerpt from a student paper reprinted in the SC workbook Writing Exercises: Building, Combining, and Revising:

Sandy is sitting at her desk, nervously tugging at her frizzy hair and worrying about the essay she should have written for her English class. Three days ago she was given the assignment, and now the paper is due in just one hour. She uncaps her Bic, carefully prints her name at the top of the page, and then squeezes her eyes shut as she waits for inspiration.

Writing about summer vacations, embarrassing moments, and the adventures of a quarter has never been one of her favorite pastimes. She would rather be outside missing a bus (it would be less frustrating) or catching a cold (it would be more enjoyable).

. . . The blank sheet of paper stares at her, almost snickering it seems. She retaliates by defacing it with loops and squiggles and curlicues that puncture the paper. That accomplished, she glances at the clock; forty minutes to go.

The concern has been expressed that since SC exercises are directed at sentence-level manipulations, they might not improve the overall quality and organization of a student's papers. With open SC exercises that have students write complete paragraphs and papers, patterns of organization are modeled, models which students can use in their own writing. In fact, SC has an advantage over just having a student read model papers because it engages the student's attention actively, so that patterns and cohesion devices are seen more fully.

But even cued SC exercises, in spite of limiting the creative manipulation of sentences, seem to bring about improvements that reach beyond just the sentence level. O'Hare had an "experimental" group of students follow an intense cued-SC program with the following results:

When eight experienced English teachers were asked to judge the overall writing quality of 30 pairs of experimental and control compositions, 60 compositions in all, that had been matched by sex and I.Q., they chose a significantly greater number of experimental compositions. Therefore, it was concluded that the experimental group wrote compositions that were significantly better in overall quality than the control group's compositions.

To be certain that students learn skills for writing complete papers, SC can be coupled with inquiry and text reconstruction. The TRC exercise entitled "The Company Needs A New Truck" in Chapter 5 shows students how to marshal support for an argument, while another exercise in the same chapter models the way details can be used to paint a verbal picture.

TRC also helps with elements of style. For example, Moffett worries that students may go sentence-combining crazy:

[Students asked to subordinate one of the clauses in a dummy sentence, or to write a modifier-cluster sentence modeled on an example, often get the idea that such constructions are absolutely good. At any rate, they will concoct them for no other motive than to comply with what seems to be the teacher's preference, just as they originally subordinated that clause to comply with the exercise directions, instead of doing so because their ideas demanded such a conjunction.

That SC can teach students the writing skill Moffett is concerned they may misuse shows it is certainly an improvement over much current writing instruction. Moreover, if Moffett's imagined misuse materializes, TRC can give students a perspective on balancing sentences for variety and pointed effect, as Kesey does here.

Before the Reagan Administration cut off liberal money to the arts and humanities, I traveled around to a lot of posh little writing-teaching gigs. They'd fly you in, you'd get a pile of manuscripts to look over and a bunch of students. After some seminars and receptions, you'd take your check and fly home.

The money was good, the hours short, the lime-light sweet. But when I look back and try to figure out, "What exactly did I teach those people?" the only thing that stands out occurred, I think, at a weekend fiction workshop somewhere in Texas. Thirty students had been picked by the regents -- not on their ability, I gradually found out, but according to how much money their families had donated to the university.

One of these chosen 30 was a nervous, blue-haired old lady; she had given a lot of money to the history wing of the library, one of the regents confided before he introduced her. She was known throughout the country as a philanthropist, activist and amateur anthropologist. But I discerned at once that what she wanted to be known as, above all, was a writer. You can't mistake those burning eyes. . . .

Kesey punctuated the last sentence as shown. It is not feasible through SC to teach all sentence patterns, punctuation possibilities, and other nuances of style. SC lays the foundation. TRC -- a type of magical looking glass which lets you fully appreciate craftsmanship by seeing the writing styles of others as your own -- opens imagination to the excitement of structuring language for creating sensual and emotional effects beyond literal meaning. Here is a set of Nordquist's sentences followed by an acceptable combination based on SC principles -- and then Steinbeck's perfect beginning for "The Flood."

The clouds marched in from the ocean.
They were gray.
They marched brokenly.
They marched over the high coast mountains.
They marched over the valleys.

They came in puffs.
They came in folds.
They came in gray crags.
They piled in together.
They settled low over the west.

The gray clouds marched brokenly in from the ocean, over the high coast mountains, over the valleys -- in puffs, folds, and gray crags -piling in together to settle low over the west.

The gray clouds marched brokenly in from the ocean and over the high coast mountains, and over the valleys, in puffs, in folds, in high crags, and they piled in together and they settled low over the west.

-- John Steinbeck

If you try writing Steinbeck's version from memory, you may see in greater detail how an artist can combine words unconventionally to create the rhythm of cloud movement within a description of clouds piling up before a flood. And sometime later at an appropriate place in your own writing you may see a rhythm take form representing your subject, perhaps even causing you to recall your teacher and smile a thanks. SC builds craftsmanship. TRC gives a magnified picture of how craftsmanship is turned to artistry.