Content Objectives
What’s A Sentence? Grammar Instruction
This is. No seriously, this is a sentence. This is also a sentence. Do you get it now? (That was a sentence as well.)
Okay, but for real: a sentence is a collection of words comprised of (at the very least) a subject (noun or pronoun) and a verb. To communicate real meaning, a writer needs to inform the reader of the action being done and the person or thing doing the action. This is a foundational grammatical concept that many students struggle with. In “A Review of Teaching Sentence-Level Writing Skills to Students with Writing Difficulties and Learning Disabilities,” Datchuk and Kubina cite 2007 testing statistics indicating that students with learning disabilities are at a disadvantage when it comes to their ability to meet proficiency standards in the area of writing.4 The disadvantage consists in students’ struggling to form complete, simple sentences (let alone compound, complex, or compound-complex sentences), and they feel unmotivated and unexcited about writing.5 However, Datchuk and Kubina’s review of the literature found some guidelines to help —specifically those with learning disabilities—improve in their sentence construction, such as direct instruction followed by guided practice which is then followed by a test of the new knowledge6 and a gradual increase in the level of sentence-complexity expected of the students.7 Datchuk and Kubina focus on students with disabilities (and published their review in 2012), but much of what they discuss likely applies to a greater number of students now, in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. Students around the world have experienced significant learning loss due to missed instruction during school closures during the pandemic, with the largest impacts hurting the most disadvantaged students, including socioeconomically disadvantaged students,8 like those who attend Title I schools.
This is obviously important knowledge for my teaching context (as a 2025 teacher of students with learning disabilities) and for my curriculum unit (which is centered around students’ authorship of clear and powerful sentences). Specific, explicit instruction on what a sentence is and how to construct one will be a crucial first lesson in this unit.
Short Sentences and Six-Word Memoirs
The six-word memoir is a form that demands precision of language, diligent reflection, and thoughtful revision.9 Based on a single-sentence story (note: not memoir) often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” and then popularized by a contest run by SMITH Magazine, the six-word memoir has become a common tool used to help teach students the power of a single sentence, as well as the importance of each word within the sentence.10
To effectively teach students about (and how to compose their own) six-word memoirs, we will need to study both the concept of the sentence and exemplars of the form. Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing is helpful with the former, and Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure is helpful with the latter.
Klinkenborg’s text is literally composed of two hundred pages of short sentences. All of these sentences work together to remind the reader that short does not equal bad or amateur, and long does not equal good or interesting. Klinkenborg uses his own short sentences to demonstrate that “they make ambiguity less likely and easier to detect.”11 He explains that shorter sentences help writers write what they mean, rather than leaving it up to the readers to intuit their meaning. Klinkenborg also discusses how longer sentences diminish the writer’s ability to imply, and how “writing by implication should be one of [a writer’s] goals.”12 The importance of implying, of selecting words so precise that they leave just the right amount up to the reader to infer, is crucial to achieving the goal of the six-word memoir—that is, a single sentence (of only six words) that can represent a core value or memory in a person’s life. Additionally, Klinkenborg emphasizes the importance of word choice as it pertains to verbs: “How many of the verbs are variants of ‘to be’—‘is,’ ‘are,’ ‘were,’ ‘was,’ and so on? Are the verbs active, energetic?”13 Though “to be” (and its cousins, “to go,” and “to do”) are pillar verbs of the English language, we can often find replacements for them that both shorten our sentences and make our writing more interesting. For example, which of the following sentences feels more compelling? “I was so sad about the news,” or “The news crushed me”? Most of us would say the second sentence is better, which helps us understand what Klinkenborg means when he asks us if our verbs are “active.”
Not Quite What I Was Planning features many short sentences that both do and do not abide by Klinkenborg’s writing advice. Though all are obviously short, some examples are less precise or imply less than others. From early in the book of six-word memoirs, we see a strong example: “The psychic said I’d be richer.—Elizabeth Bernstein.”14 Though this sentence does not provide every possible detail, Klinkenborg reminds writers who may wonder whether they can bend the rules they were taught (perhaps leaving off details like which psychic, when the psychic made the prediction, what the psychic said exactly, and so on) that, “Yes, [they’re] allowed to. Not forever and always, but until [they] decide for [themselves] what works and what doesn’t.”15 Adhering to Klinkenborg’s advice about implication, this exemplary memoir from Not Quite What I Was Planning has certainly cut away many details, and the short sentence that results gives readers room to hear from the writer “in silence.”16 Elizabeth Bernstein likely could have written an essay about her reflections on the psychic, full of vivid details and dialogue, but her six words tell us what is important, and we can infer the rest. Some possible inferences you (and students) may make are as follows: she wishes she had more money, adult life is harder than she had predicted, she’s a bit less trusting now compared to her earlier years. And we get all of that because (not in spite of) the word limit!
“The psychic said I’d be richer” is just one among hundreds of six-word memoirs in Not Quite What I Was Planning that could be used as examples of what it means to write a good sentence. Below, I will be focusing on three rhetorical techniques that I am going to be teaching to my students, and I will provide relevant examples from Not Quite What I Was Planning. But since my students will not stop at six words, neither will I! I will be including longer (closer to, though not always quite, 250 words) examples of the rhetorical techniques I am describing.
In his 2018 textbook Writing with Clarity and Style: A Guide to Rhetorical Devices for Contemporary Writers, Robert A. Harris defines rhetoric as “the art of using language effectively.”17 Though my seventh- and eighth-grade students do not necessarily need to be able to define terms such as anaphora or epizeuxis, they do need to know the techniques those terms represent, and they need to understand how these techniques can influence their writing (and their reader).
Strong Word Choice
Writing is all decisions: the decision to sit down and write, the decision of what to write about, the decision of which genre to write about the topic in. Perhaps most important is the decision of which words to use to communicate the ideas in one’s mind. Ronald T. Kellogg, in his 2008 article “Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective,” describes this decision making process in the following way: “The composition of extended texts is widely recognized as a form of problem solving. The problem of content—what to say—and the problem of rhetoric—how to say it—consumes the writer’s attention and other resources of working memory.”18 Kellogg goes on to discuss, from a cognitive perspective, all of the reasons that writing is a many-headed monster of a task to master [the holding of the pencil, the learning to make the letters (and then the words), the picking out of the words to represent the thoughts, the understanding that there will be a reader].19 However, what is important for us (secondary teachers) to glean is that by middle school, students typically have had enough practice holding their pencils (or typing on their keyboards) and forming letters and words to free up enough working memory to focus on the task of choosing words that will work better for their readers.20
However, like all other physical and cognitive tasks, Kellogg tells us, composition requires practice to become an expert; he quotes Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer, both talking about how much time and practice went into their craft before they were able to find success.21 In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes on the necessity of grit for writers, the importance of beginning even in undesirable conditions: “It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.”22 In summation, writers get better at writing by practicing writing. In practicing writing, students get better and better at picking words that mean exactly what they want them to mean.
The following two six-word memoirs from Not Quite What I Was Planning can serve as examples of short texts with different degrees of verbal effectiveness: “Went on long ride toward Providence. – Bill Buck”23 and “I managed not to destroy anything. – Tucker Frazier.”24 In the form of the six-word memoir, “every word is on trial,” teacher Emily Smith reminds fifth-grade students when they begin their first writing unit of the year.25 Because the writer only has six words to illustrate a meaningful experience or thought, each word must be considered thoughtfully and then chosen for its specific meaning. In “Went on long ride toward Providence,” the verb chosen to center the sentence around is “went,” the past tense, of course, of the verb “to go” (the implied subject is “I,” since this is a memoir). However, Mr. Buck also includes the word “ride,” which, though here it is used as a noun, can also be a verb used in place of “to go.” Though we may assume that the most important part of his journey was that he decided to go on it, and though Buck may be writing about Providence as a double entendre (or even a single entendre that simply is not the city in Rhode Island; students will need some background on the location of Providence as well as the word’s alternate meaning regarding the Christian god’s leadership), it would be a fun experiment to explore different phrasings with students and see which they find most interesting. Perhaps Buck could have written, “Kept riding my motorcycle until Providence,” or “Rode in my truck toward Providence,” or even “Travelled all the way to Providence.” (I do not know Buck’s mode of transportation, but neither will my students. We can use our imaginations as a means of playing with different verbs to see what’s most dazzling.) Though Buck’s six-word memoir plays with implication and ambiguity in an arguably effective way—providing the reader with questions of whether he means Providence in a concrete or an abstract way, why he describes his journey as a “long ride,” etc.—there are ways to revise it in my middle school classroom to have a clearer verb.
Conversely, the second example listed above, “I managed not to destroy anything,” uses two verbs which evoke exactly what the speaker is talking about. “Managed” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “To deal or cope with; to tackle; to produce, bring about, or to bring to pass, by contrivance, with effort, or with difficulty.”26 To focus on “with effort, with difficulty”: the use of this verb indicates to readers that it was not natural or easy for the speaker to complete his task, giving us an image of struggle as we read. Again, we can play with alternative phrasings to see just how effective Frazier’s verbs are. Had he written, instead, “I didn’t destroy anything at all,” using the past tense of the auxiliary verb “to do,” he would have diminished the richness of his memoir, watering down the intensity that comes from an image of struggle. “Managed” is a verb that carries meaning in it in a way that “did” does not. Frazier also uses the infinitive, “to destroy,” which again evokes a clear image in the reader’s mind. He could have chosen “to ruin” or revised the memoir more fully to say, “Made sure to keep things together,” framing the topic more positively. By focusing on destruction (destroy is defined as “To pull down or undo (that which has been built); to demolish, raze to the ground”27), we sense that there was a certain violence to the impulse, or perhaps that there was a neglectful tendency in the speaker. Something additional to consider, particularly regarding the comparison between “destroy” and “ruin” (which have similar definitions),28 is the sound of each. The st- in destroy to me evokes a more negative quality than the smooth ru- of ruin. Though this unit does not focus specifically on sound as a rhetorical choice, it can be an engaging way to help students make decisions between synonyms. Which sounds more like what you want your verb to mean? I digress; both verbs included in Frazier’s six-word memoir (“manage,” “to destroy”) serve a strategic purpose in creating vivid meaning.
We can observer this same concept, that of the strong, vivid verb, in a chapter of Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. After a paragraph in which Dillard describes an occasion when her mother approached a stranger and pulled a funny little prank, Dillard details the immediate fallout: “And off she sashayed, taking me firmly by the hand, and leading us around briskly past the monkey house and away. She cocked an ear back, and both of us heard the desperate man begin, in a high-pitched wail, ‘I swear, I never saw her before in my life….’”29 In this short excerpt, we get the idea of Dillard’s mother as a confident and decisive woman, largely due to the verb choice; “sashayed,” “leading,” “cocked,” all help paint a picture of the mother that Dillard wants us to admire. Sashay’s definition indicates that it is a casual movement,30 which is funny in the wake of the way that Dillard’s mother has just upturned a stranger’s date. Leading someone requires persuasiveness, to be able to cause an action in another.31 To cock etymologically evokes a cockerel, or a male chicken strutting about, and though in this context it means “to tilt or bend (a part of the body) so that it is at an angle,”32 the confidence of a cockerel is implied. In two sentences, three verbs, we get a portrait of Dillard’s mother that communicates a casual confidence.
Sentence Length Variation
Many writing resources encourage writers to vary their sentence structure and length.33 The intentional variation in the lengths of sentences (building longer and longer sentences, including a series of complex sentences punctuated by a simple sentence, etc.) helps with readers’ sense of flow or can emphasize certain ideas or emotions the writer is hoping to convey. We hear this most clearly when we read our writing (or the writing of others) aloud. Finding and delighting in the natural acceleration or pauses that come with different combinations of sentence types can be a way to engage students in grammar and rhetoric instruction. Some helpful terms to consider when thinking about sentence length instruction are asyndeton and polysyndeton. “Asyndeton … consists of omitting conjunctions between words, phrases, or clauses in a list.”34 Using asyndeton gives the feeling of spontaneity rather than premeditation.35 Polysyndeton is asyndeton’s opposite, “the use of a conjunction between each word, phrase, or clause,” and gives the reader a feeling of “deliberate[ly] piling up.”36 Both asyndeton and polysyndeton are useful tools to help students think of a reason to write a long sentence. What is something they might need to list? Do they want to sound planned or not? That is for them to decide!
Though the six-word memoir is a constrained form, authors still accomplish interesting variation in sentence length. It should be mentioned that for the purposes of examining a six-word memoir, I am using the word “sentence” loosely, allowing the word to encompass fragments that, if they were not required to carry so much meaning in so few words, might have been expanded into complete subject / predicate sentences. Many six-word memoirs in Not Quite What I Was Planning have an implied “I” as the subject, leaping directly into the verb. Other “sentences” consist only of an adjective. For example, “Smart,” with an “I am” being implied rather than explicitly stated. This makes room for a second idea or a progression within the remaining few words. You may be wondering how this non-standard construction will affect those students I have previously described as in need of grammar instruction to encourage correct sentence construction. First they need to learn the rules, and then they need to learn how and why they can break them. When reviewing and examining six-word memoirs as example texts, a teacher might have students identify which memoirs are truly sentences, and which are truncated, would-be sentences.
One example of a six-word memoir which uses multiple “sentences” of various lengths is Rachel Pine’s submission to Not Quite What I Was Planning: “Outcast. Picked last. Surprised them all.”37 For the purposes of examining a six-word memoir, we have three sentences (/ fragments) here, all of which deal with implied subjects, and sometimes verbs. “Outcast,” we infer translates to “I was outcast,” and “Picked last” implies the subject and auxiliary verb combo, “I was picked last.” However, the word limit of the form allows the writer to craft progressively longer sentences, building momentum in the memoir. Had the author instead written something like, “I was bullied, but am successful,” we get the same general information about her, but without the building tension of the increasingly long sentences.
A different kind of variation in the length of “sentences” in the six-word memoir can be seen in the following text: “Mistook streetlight for the moon. Climbed. – Zack Wentz.”38 In this memoir, the author begins with a verb with an implied subject of “I”, and he drops a possible article such as “a streetlight.” The second sentence is one verb, “climbed,” with another implied subject of “I.” These two sentences together are more interesting than if the writer had written, “I climbed straight up a streetlight,” because the intentional break between the first, longer sentence and the second, single-word sentence gives us a sense of determination in the word “climbed.”
A longer illustration of the effect that sentence length (and type) variation can have on a piece is below:
Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw the Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize, its pristine concave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon hundreds or thousands of miles from where I am. I will be driving down Sunset Boulevard, or about to enter a freeway, and abruptly those power transmission towers will appear before me, canted vertiginously over the tailrace. Sometimes I am confronted by the intakes and sometimes by the shadow of the heavy cable that spans the canyon and sometimes by the ominous outlets to unused spillways, black in the lunar clarity of the desert light. Quite often I hear the turbines. Frequently I wonder what is happening at the dam this instant, at this precise intersection of time and space, how much water is being released to fill down-stream orders and what lights are flashing and which generators are in full use and which just spinning free.39
This is excerpted from Joan Didion’s “At the Dam,” in which she uses many very long sentences to describe her fascination with (fixation on) the Hoover Dam. The lengths of each sentence from the above passage (in words) are as follows: 23, 46, 28, 38, 6, 46. One of these sentences is not like the others! It is easy to identify the single short sentence among its neighbors which range in length from pretty long to breathlessly long. It is a little more difficult to understand why that sentence (“Quite often I hear the turbines.”) needs to stick out as it does. It is a little easier, I think, to make sense of the breathlessly long sentences. Didion is inviting us to understand how completely and overwhelmingly the Hoover Dam takes over her thoughts, even when she is hundreds of miles away. By constructing these 28-, 38-, and 46-word long sentences detailing various of the dam’s attributes, the different ways it appears to her, the questions she often asks herself about it, Didion gives us the sense that she is overwhelmed by her wonderment and admiration of the dam. The single short sentence adds to the intensity of the sensory overload that Didion experiences by breaking the rhythm that we can feel and hear throughout the rest of the paragraph, while also informing us that Didion’s obsession is not only visual but also auditory. It is not only an image in her mind, but a sound in her ears that recurs throughout her life, as she is trying to complete daily tasks.
Repetition
In Chapter 11 of Writing with Clarity and Style, titled “Restatement I,” Robert A. Harris explains his choice to use “restatement” rather than “repetition” to describe the rhetorical devices which feature repeated words or phrases in various parts of a sentence. Harris acknowledges that mindless or careless repetition is not helpful toward developing clarity or meaning in one’s writing. But he distinguishes this from “the strategic restatement of words and phrases” which “enables the writer to stress an idea, maintain or regain focus, define a term, and even enhance the stylistic quality of the prose.”40 With my middle-school students, I think I will stick with “repetition.” But I also think I will have to repeatedly remind students that just because there is a name for something, and just because that something can be used as a tool to improve writing, does not mean that it will invariably improve writing. The following paragraphs will present and examine examples of rhetorical devices in the category of repetition.
“I grew and grew and grew. – Randy Newcomer”41 is an example of a six-word memoir which effectively uses repetition. Harris identifies for us this style of repetition as epizeuxis, or “the repetition of one word or a short phrase.”42 Harris goes on to explain that the primary and secondary uses of epizeuxis are to communicate that there is a large amount of whatever the repeated word refers to, “as if a single word could not perform the task by itself” and/or to simply emphasize an idea.43
In the case of Randy Newcomer’s “and grew,” we understand that the epizeuxis both indicates that there was a lot, a lot, a lot of growing and that the growing is the most important thing. Particularly in such a short text, the use of three out of six allocated words to say that the narrator grew lets us know that the growing did not stop, while still leaving us to wonder as to what type of growth he is referring to. Is Mr. Newcomer particularly tall? Did he have a lot of personal development to do well into adulthood? Is it both, or perhaps neither? While the repetition, the epizeuxis, of this memoir emphasizes the importance and the amount of growth the narrator experienced, we still have room to interpret the meaning behind the emphasis – implication wins again!
A longer example of repetition, used this time in a personal narrative, is Jo Ann Beard’s repetition of the word “whistle” in the essay, “Bonanza” in her 1998 collection, The Boys of My Youth.
I went to visit Grandma and Ralph for a week right after having learned how to whistle. I whistled at all times, with dedication and complete concentration. When I was asked a question I whistled the answer, I whistled along with people as they talked, I whistled while I worked, I whistled while I played. Eventually they made a rule that whistling was forbidden in their house. I felt bereft and didn’t know what to do with my lips if I couldn’t whistle.44
What we see in this excerpt is an example of anaphora, which Harris describes as “the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences,” often using the repeated phrase to “[embody] a concept that the author desires to emphasize.”45 By repeating “I whistled,” Beard emphasizes to readers the pervasiveness of her whistling during her visit to her grandmother’s house. We are able to empathize with Grandma and Ralph when they outlaw whistling, because Beard gives us a sense of how grating the ever-present whistling becomes. If Beard were to have written instead, “I whistled at all times,” and left it at that, we receive the same factual information, but not the same emotional impact. Placing emphasis on the act of whistling in the many different contexts that Beard does creates a clear image of what it is like to be an adult living through a child’s whistling phase without relying on modifiers like irritating, annoying, unpleasant, etc.
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