Strong Sentences

The 53rd in the Egan Pattern Language

Note: Can you spot the glaring problem with this pattern? Post your guesses in the comments; the winner will receive glory undying.

Art for Lost Tools by Skylar Kaster

1. A problem

For most people, writing well is oddly hard.

A kid whose mouth produces a never-ending stream of elegance might freeze up when you put a pencil in her hand. The sentence she finally hands in may, if spoken aloud, sound like it came from someone with brain damage.

And this doesn’t automatically go away when she grows up: many perfectly intelligent adults write emails that only optimistically be described “literate”.

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2. Basic plan

Give kids clear sentence patterns to emulate.

Start with the simplest: subject verb. Begin with an example sentence:

Cougars prowl.

Don’t let the words “subject” or “verb” come out of your mouth yet. Instead, ask what each word is doing. If they have no idea, that’s fine — just give more examples:

Cougars snarl.
The cougar bites.
A cougar sneezes.

Trees burp.
Hamsters burp.
Grandparents burp.

“Ah,” they might say, “the first word is a thing, and the second word is what the thing is doing!” Excellent: now tell them that “verb” is the fancy term that we have for that.¹

When they figure out that the first word names the thing that’s doing something, tell them the fancy word for it is “noun”.²

Now have them create their own sentences according to this structure. If you’re working with a student one-on-one, you can then have them pick one to be the stand-in for this pattern. Otherwise, you can choose one yourself.

That’s one pattern. Later, do variations on its structure —

Purple trees sneeze. (Introduce adjectives.)
Trees sneeze loudly. (Introduce adverbs.)
Ancient, gnarled, enchanted trees sneeze. (Series of adjectives.)
Trees sneeze explosively, dramatically, and unexpectedly. (Series of adverbs.)

Then take on entirely different structures. Soon, you want to get to elegant constructions like…

Subject verb; however, subject verb.
Subject — appositive — verb.
Independent clause: independent clause.

Use this to teach many of what goes into making a sentence great.

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3. What you might see

Kids in elementary school…

• fluently writing bold, clear sentences

• jumping up and down when they spot a certain pattern in a book

Kids in middle school…

• easily putting their thoughts onto paper

• being surprisingly well-versed in grammar terms

Kids in high school…

• discussing how certain structures make a reader feel

• speaking in complex sentences

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4. Why?

Educational traditionalism and progressivism often approach elementary-age writing in unhelpful ways.³

The standard traditionalist practice in elementary school is to get kids the memorize the names of grammar terms: nouns, verbs, etc. I’ll admit that I sort of love teaching grammar terms, but I’ve long been confused as to why people think it’s actually important. (Do people imagine that 21st century kids are going to spend their lives playing Mad-Libs? How is this thought to support good writers?)

The standard progressivist practice is to stand back, encourage kids to write, and trust that good writing will come naturally to them. This demonstrably works for some kids — truly, for some kids and writing, the best thing to do is to get out of their way and stay there. But it demonstrably doesn’t work for most kids, and that’s because writing is an insanely complex process. When we write, we have to hold a lot in our heads:

• the ideas we’re trying to communicate

• the structure of the sentence

• the structure of the whole passage

• spelling, punctuation, and capitalization

• how to move our hands to get words on the page/computer

Clinging to the romantic notion that all children are natural writers dooms many children to being inept at writing. And there’s no need for this.

Sentence patterns liberate kids to focus on content. When they’re internalized, they automate the work of structuring the sentence, and help kids steer clear of common grammar errors. They make it natural to see through the information and consider the syntax of what you’re reading.

(And of course along the way they encourage kids to be goofy and creative.)

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5. Egan’s insight

Where do we see this in the human experience?

Writing isn’t natural. As Steven Pinker (who Egan was fond of quoting) wrote:

A group of children is no more likely to invent an alphabet than it is to invent the internal combustion engine. Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.

–Steven Pinker, in the introduction to Diane McGuinness’s Why Our Children Can’t Read, and What We Can Do About It

So how have people become so good at writing? Largely, through 🤸‍♀️IMITATION.

One of the first truly great writing instructors was Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (“Quintilian” to us), whose work become so well appreciated that the Roman Emperor paid him to run a school of rhetoric. His innovation was imitatio — imitating good writing so as to make its strengths your own… and then improve on them.

Copying had been done for centuries (the Romans having, ahem, copied the practice from the Greeks), but Quintilian thought much of it had gone bad. Students were imitating without understanding, seeing only the surface-level features of good writing, and therefore making their own writing worse:

“Despite the brilliance of their imitation and the close resemblance of their language and rhythm… they degenerate into something worse.” (Institutio Oratoria, 3.16)

Instead, he had students identify what was good across many authors and seek to emulate their moves in their own writing. Imitatio was humanistic: a way to gain the strengths of the masters.

This pattern can be seen as a method in miniature of the same thing.

How might this build different kinds of understanding?

There’s a link between subtle sentences and subtle thinking. I’m treading carefully here — I don’t want to trip down the rabbit hole of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — but it’s uncontroversial that

1. we write quite differently than we speak, and

2. children beginning to write do so with simple, declarative sentences, and

3. cultures evolved complex sentence structures to help make sense of their increasingly complex, analytical ideas.

This struck Egan as incredibly important. As I covered in my review of The Educated Mind, the invention of writing opened the door to new kinds of logic (letting you do cool tricks, like knowing the color a bear in a land you’ve never visited). Egan went further, suggesting that the sort of writing we do and read opens up the more abstract thinking of PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) understanding.

He wasn’t alone in this — many people have noted that we’re increasingly surrounded by abstractions. You see it in our vocabulary. Something like this is even one of the popular theories as to why IQ went up steadily throughout the 1900s. Insofar as these people are on to something, we might hope that making kids the masters of these abstract sentences patterns might help them reason more carefully.

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6. This might be especially useful for…

Students who struggle with any aspect of writing. As writing involves doing many things at once (see above), making more steps automatic frees up your working memory so doing the other things are easier.

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7. Critical questions

Q: Some of those example sentences you gave were… fanciful.

As Dr. Seuss said, “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.” Even more important here, creating silly sentences highlights that we’re studying the structures of sentences, not their content: colorless green ideas probably can’t sleep furiously in real life, but they can in a sentence. Grammar allows us to explore hypothetical worlds.

Q: How quickly should you go through these?

That depends on what your kids need. A high schooler could do 5 patterns a day, speedrunning these to prepare for the SAT Writing section. An elementary schooler might want to have a basic pattern per week, with lots of small variations:

Trees sneeze.
A tree sneezes.
The trees sneeze.

Q: Does this curriculum exist?

Not yet, to my knowledge — though pieces of it already do. (Keep reading.)

Q: I’m worried that when it’s time to write their own sentence, my kid will just stare at the paper for an hour.

You can gamify it by limiting the topic they’re writing about. (If they have a Learning in Depth topic, this might be a good time for them to whip out their ever-expanding body of weird facts.)

Q: Could this be used to learn another language?

This might be a wonderful way to begin to learn the grammar of your second language — on first blush, at least, it looks a little like the “sentence play” that Gabriel Wyner is advocating in chapter 5 of the new edition of Fluent Forever.

But can you spot the problem in this pattern? I’m quite serious that there is one. Become a subscriber and join in the comments conversation.

8. Physical space

If you’d like, you can keep a running list of the sentence patterns on a wall. You might want to include three sentences for each:

1. the structure put in grammar terms: Subject verb.

2. a whimsical sentence: Grandparents burp.

3. a proverb: Time flies.

(For the whimsical sentence, it’ll be good if you can keep the same theme for different patterns, so it’s easy for kids to see how the patterns change over time.)

This way, any kid struggling to come up with a sentence can look to the wall for inspiration.

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9. Who else is doing this?

I’ll be frank that I’m adapting stealing this from my high school English teacher Mary Ann Penglase who, in addition to helping me fall in love with Macbeth and the work of Willa Cather,⁴ taught me subtle art of sentence patterns. She pulled from a classic text, The Art of Styling Sentences: 20 Patterns for Success.

How might we start small, now?

That book was designed for high school and college students, but I and my wife previously adapted the core of that book to work with third, fourth, and fifth graders. What we came up with is… a start. Lately, she’s been extending it to help our middle- and high-school-age kids hone their writing. Take a look!

In the future, I’d love to revisit this project, and create a much fuller version... one that fixes the glaring error that’s presently baked into it. In the meantime, feel free to create your own! (If you’d like to share them with others, let me know.)

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10. Related patterns

Like memorizing A Poem a Week°, this is a way to help you focus on the subtle powers of how words can be fit together. If you’d like to integrate this into World Proverbs°, it’s easy — just pick some for each sentence pattern: Time flies. Money talks.

The old-timey, much-ridiculed practice of Diagramming Sentences° would fit snugly into this, as a way to visualize what the sentence is doing. And its logical sequel is Powerful Paragraphs°, which helps you see how sentences can gain more power as they work together.

This is a way to learn grammar inductively. As such, it might be modified to build an understanding of a foreign language, which I’ve begun writing about here, here, and here.

Each sentence pattern might be good food for your Forgetting Curve Box°.

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Afterword:

Did you figure out the glaring problem with this pattern? I’ll give you a hint: something essential is missing from it. First one to figure it out and write it in the comments gets eternal glory. (And… go!)

After I fix the problem, this pattern will become part of the Egan approach to education that I’ll be presenting in a series of workshops this summer. On the surface, it’s for homeschoolers (and for elementary-aged homeschoolers at that), but if you’ve been reading this blog, you know that most of what we should teach six-year-olds is stuff that few college-educated adults know, so you’re happily invited, whatever your circumstances.

I’d love to flesh out this particular pattern into a full curriculum, but who has the time? Because of that, it’s struck me that this could be a good opportunity to experiment with doing a Kickstarter, a medium I’ve long thought about, but have no actual experience with. If you have, and would like to share your thoughts or ideas, I’d love ‘em!

1. “Verb” literally means “word”. Why did it become the stand-in for the action part of a sentence, rather than for (say) what’s doing the action? The grammar-geeks in the late Roman empire viewed a sentence’s action as its core, its beating heart. Of course, they must have thought, if anything is going to be called the word, it must be the verb.

2. And “noun” is indeed Latin for “name”. This is one of those situations where a little etymology can make things clearer.

3. I’ll emphasize the often here: there are many ways that each approach teaches writing, and some of them work great for some kids. And it’s not that this method will be a natural fit for every kid, either! Let a thousand flowers bloom…

4. I’m leisurely re-re-reading My Ántonia, and am blown away by what that woman can do with a paragraph.