Berthoff-style sentence and paragraph variation exercises to connect what students write with how they write it¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The article describes classroom practices from Berthoff's Forming, Thinking, Writing that ask student writers to study, analyze, and construct multiple variations of sentences and paragraphs in order to recognize a good voice for prose and develop different voices of their own. Examples include scrutinizing sentences by Rachel Carson, identifying parts of speech, writing interpretive paraphrases, comparing paragraphs by different professional writers, and rearranging a jumbled collection of sentences into an original paragraph. The purpose is to show students the concrete relationship between what they write and how they write it.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Exercises must foreground the relationship of language and thought, asking how one way of putting something differs from another and changes what is said.

Constraints¶

Target Learners¶

• first-year college composition students

Target Learning Goals¶

• developing critical thinking through stylistic analysis
• recognizing how language choices shape meaning and voice

Affordances¶

• Rubin Socio Stylistics Writing

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

-

Key Sources¶

• Pace, Tom. (2001). Composing and Community: The Teaching of Style as a Tool of Critical Pedagogy. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED451526