Controlled Writing: A Transformational Approach

Acquiring skill in composition involves acquiring control over rhetorical devices-setting up a central idea, maintaining this idea throughout the composition, presenting the material in orderly sequence, and so on. Basic to composition skill is control of sentence structure and accuracy in mechanics so that the student writes correctly the first time and does not practice errors. Control over sentence structure can be exercised by a number of different devices, most of which involve imitation of some kind. We often say that speech should precede composition, that a student should not write patterns that he has not first heard and then practiced orally. But there is a difference in the structures used in speech and in writing. Written patterns are more compactly structured. We might equally well say that the student should not be expected to write grammatical patterns that he has not read. person who writes well is usually the one who has read widely and who has heard good oral reading. Though he may not imitate in his writing all of the layers of structure used in any one sentence he has read, he observes through reading what the patterns of the language are. By conscious manipulation of these patterns in writing, he can develop control over their use. One approach to doing this is through an application of transformational grammar, not because transformational grammar presents rules but because it provides a systematic method of constructing sentences. I have heard English teachers reject transformational grammar as the learning of formulae and the construction of branching tree diagrams, activities which would seem to have little carry-over to composition either for the native student or the student of English as a seocnd language. But one aspect of transformational grammar is its analysis of a sentence as consisting of a kernel or basic sentence pattern-the bare sentence that I learned about in traditional grammar in the seventh grade-the elements of which can be rearranged or into which other kernel patterns can be inserted by a transform process to produce the most complex of sentence structure patterns. person for whom English is the first language may use forms, particularly in speech, that are not acceptable to the educated because that is what he has heard: We was or He done it. In his writing he may produce dangling modifiers or otherwise poorly constructed sentences through lack of skill. But unlike the person who may speak as a first language one that is put together in a way very different from English, he does not violate the basic system. For example, the native speaker of English would not say, All gone milk, or write, as one of my foreign students recently did, The French little pretty girl sang a song. He chooses the correct pattern not