Sentence Combining: An Experiment in Teaching Writing

Abstract

technique for teaching writing. It evolved from research studies in English education. In the 1960s, investigators in this field were interested in tracing the syntactic development of school children. But before they could do so objectively, it was necessary to find measures of syntactic complexity that could be easily employed to analyze large samples of writing produced by schoolchildren. Furthermore, these measures had to be sensitive enough to discriminate between writing from different grade levels. One of the most promising measures for this task turned out to be the minimal termin-