Noticing and Imitating Sentence Structure – (illustrated with Prown)

 Reading done in preparation:

•     Jules David Prown “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?”

 Class discussion/activity:

Objective: students imitate the interrupted sentence structure Prown uses throughout the essay. The structure is especially useful for embedding definitions or examples, providing short illustrations or creating asides which lend a conversational tone to the writing.

Task: Students will have surely noted the many interrupted sentences in Prown’s essay and may have previously created a list of when such structures are employed. For example:

·        To provide definitions: Material culture is just what it says it is—namely, the manifestations of culture through material productions.

·        To provide examples (another kind of definition): And the study of material culture is the study of material to understand culture, to discover the beliefs—the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions—of a particular community or society at a given time.

·        To insert an aside that qualifies the sentence: Several scholars have observed that any artifact—and the inclusive view would mean any work of art as well—is a historical event.

Time: (20 mins) remind (or create) the kinds of interruptions that generate this sentence structure. Using several examples, discuss when this structure might be useful, and how this structure works, i.e.

o       The sentence has to be complete and grammatical if the interruption is omitted

o       The interruption can come at the end or in the middle of the sentence

o       Where the interruption occurs has to make sense given the substance of the interruption (qualifiers follow nouns, for example)

           (20 mins) students produce imitations of the structure using their own topics. You may need to illustrate what you mean by imitating the structure with different content if students haven’t done this kind of work before. The practice time can proceed in a number of ways from highly controlled—imitating the exact form but with different words—to more loosely controlled—create any sentence with an interruption like this. You may want students to generate one imitation and share with the class or give them time to produce several examples before sharing the results. Some students like to do this exercise in partners or small groups; others prefer to work individually.

           (20 mins) return to an essay you’ve already written and locate a place where this structure might be used. Rewrite the passage using the interrupted structure. In small groups compare the results. Which version do you like best and why? What advantages and disadvantages do you see to this structure?

Next Step: you may want to introduce alternative structures for these needs either in the same class period or in subsequent ones. As an alternative, you might ask students to try rewriting these sentences without the interruption but to include all the information of the original.

Notes:  imitations like this can work for any number of sentence structures or even paragraph forms. Practices like this one are especially good for class days when students will be turning in a written product and so won’t have had time to do any reading in preparation for a new discussion. We think it’s important to stress that students needn’t ever use a structure they’ve imitated, but that noticing and being able to reproduce a structure they learn from another writer will increase their repertoire of choices. We also readily admit that Prown probably should have used this structure a bit more judiciously—a critique our students are delighted to offer—because part of its impact is in it unusualness.