| Nearly all first-year composition learning objectives state that writing instructors will help each student to improve their knowledge of written conventions, like punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Historically, it has been difficult to achieve significant learning gains in writing mechanics. This teaching failure disproportionately damages the most linguistically, economically, racially, and culturally diverse students, who have the most documented deficits in this vital area, but all students benefit from strengthening this area.
This dissertation asserts that if first-year composition instructors provide explicit sentence-level instruction that focuses on the clausal structure instead of the marks or the mistakes, their students will be able to compose more clear, concise sentences that meet the grammatical and punctuation conventions of Standard Edited American English. To strategically teach sentence-level structure, this dissertation delineates six critical sentence-building skills that each student can develop using simple organizational principles that leverage their vast, innate grammatical knowledge. To develop each skill, this dissertation will provide four new pedagogical tools:
1. a formal metacognitive framework that describes the ranked structure of the written language using an accessible, consistent terminology
2. a constituent map that students can use to edit their writing in order to test the organization, readability, and conventionality of each sentence
3. visual punctuation resources that help students to choose the conventional mark that creates the right rhetorical impact
4. a formative grading system to help identify the mistakes that persist and guide students to get the right help to prevent mistakes in future work
The tools are designed so that wide range of students can use them to edit their existing writing and learn their own idiosyncratic writing strengths and weaknesses. With these resources, students can leverage their linguistic strength to gain the mechanical sophistication that they need for college-level writing. With repeated practice, students can eventually make these skills automatic, leaving more cognitive room for other writing concerns. These resources are developed with principles from composition theory, functional linguistics, cognitive learning theory, second language acquisition, and others.
Keywords: writing studies, composition theory, grammar, punctuation, writing mechanics, first-year composition, basic writing, writing conventions, multimodality, functional grammar, linguistics, cognitive learning theory, second language acquisition, pedagogy, transfer, metacognition, rhetoric, rhetoric and composition, neurologic turn |