Stalking Sentences: Grammar in Context

My summer work station

This week I’ve been stalking 2-word sentences: 

• “I guess.” Wonder p. 3
• “I promise.” Wonder p. 16
• “She knows.” Wonder p. 191
• “I concentrated.” Code Talker p. 117
• “Everyone worried.” Code Talker p. 200
• “It’s hard.” Barak Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis

This is an exercise from Jeff Anderson’s Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop which I’ve been reading this week. Anderson says to teach and learn grammar in context, you have to become a “sentence stalker.” Two-word sentences is one of the first sentences he has students stalk. 

As I stalked, I noticed several things. For one, 2-word sentences really aren’t very common, but they are around. After finding some in Wonder, the novel I’m preparing to teach in September, I also started noticing them in Code Talker by Chester Nez, the autobiography of one of the designers of the Navaho-based code used by the US military in World War 2 that I’m reading for my own recreation. So 2-word sentences occur not only in middle grade fiction, but also in adult biography. When I didn’t notice any in the nonfiction book I’m reading, America’s Original Sin by Jim Wallis, I wondered if that were characteristic of argument, so I scanned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Congressman John Lewis’s final letter, and Barak Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis. I found some short sentences, but only one 2-word sentence, and that is actually a 3-word sentence because one of the words is a contraction. 

What is the subject in every 2-word sentence I found? A pronoun. Anderson listed some sentences with a proper noun for the subject. I can imagine plural subjects: Dogs bark. Or noncount: Water drips. But most singular nouns would have to take an article. And so many sentences expand at least a bit with more than one verb and an object after, like John Lewis’s shortest sentences at 4 words: “You must do something.” “You can lose it.”

Once we can identify that 2-word sentence core and the bits that come along with it, we can “add on without running on,” as Anderson says. Here are some examples I've noticed for picking out participles and participial phrases (also prepositional phrases, an absolute phrase, and a dependent clause, but Anderson emphasizes focusing on one thing at a time):

• “Another girl came over to the table carrying a tray.” (Wonder 51)
• “…she said, smiling, her eyes open wide, as she waited for me to get it.” (Wonder 52)
• Whooping, I ran into the ocean fully clothed. (Code Talker 118)

The last time I read Mechanically Inclined, I was teaching 10th grade, and while some of the author's ideas seemed a little too middle school (that is his audience), several of them were really helpful:  

• The mindset of identifying students’ pseudo-concepts instead of errors, seeing the strengths and what students need to mature those strengths. For instance, seeing run-on sentences as a student’s first attempts to express more complex ideas in more complex grammatical forms—only lacking the appropriate punctuation. 
• The use of models from reading. I recently did that for teaching punctuating dialogue. Noticing patterns in published work and practicing the pattern. Then going back to literature to find more instances of the pattern. 
• The use of wall charts to track and curate deepening understanding. I haven’t done that since we started the new school year distance learning in April, but I need to re-figure out how to make it work whether virtually or in person.

I'm excited about incorporating even more of Anderson's ideas into my 6th and 7th grade English class this fall. I think that as I become curious about and attentive to sentences, modeling it and prompting students to observe, collect, hypothesize, and try it out, I can make that attentiveness and curiosity contagious in my classroom. And as my students and I foster this relationship with language, we can wield it with more skill, confidence, and power to love God and neighbor in our world.