The Art of the Sentence

Andrew Atherton

Irish novelist John Banville once described the sentence as ‘the greatest invention of civilisation’. He’s not the only one to ascribe the humble sentence with such grandiosity. Former US Poet Laureate, Robert Hass, likewise declared that ‘the sentence is being’ since ‘it is the mode of individuation’.

Characteristically lyrical — one would expect nothing less of a novelist and a poet — Banville and Hass both point to a profound and fundamental truth: without the sentence, thought ceases to exist. We think in and through sentences. All human discovery — little or big — could be said to have started life a series of small sentences.

It matters then that as teachers we help our students to craft the best possible sentences that convey just what they mean.

Over the years, my own teaching has gravitated more and more to explicitly teaching particular sentence shapes, or what are also called ‘sentence stems’. Sentence stems are highly repeatable syntactic formulations that students can adapt and adopt in their writing, changing them to suit a range of different topics. In this article, I’ll share three of my favourite and most effective sentence stems as well as how I embed them into my English teaching.

Sentence Stem No. 1: Establishing

All English essays are fundamentally persuasive. Students have something to say about a text they’ve read and then spend the essay trying to convince the writer that this is a valid and interesting thing to think.

As such, being able to establish a line of argument is an incredibly important skill, not just at the start but throughout a piece of writing.

Here’s three sentence stems that I teach, all designed to help students establish a clear argument:

• When considering ________, a compelling direction to take would be __________.
• Crucially, ___________.
• Whilst at first glance it seems ________, upon a closer inspections it seems more likely that _________.

Even simply encouraging students to rehearse beginning sentences with ‘crucially’ helps to cue them up to consider what really matters in their thinking. The sentence stem becomes a filter through which they push their thinking, helping to make it more precise.

Sentence Stem No. 2: Transitioning

Student essays can often feel like a series of disjointed bullet points. Mastering the art of the transition is one of the best things students can do to upgrade their writing.

Teach this simple — yet powerful — sentence stem to provide an almost instant improvement to student writing:

• This sense of ______ is [X] by _________.

Here, students pull forward the last idea they discussed and connect it to the upcoming idea. The ‘X’ refers to a range of transitional verbs students might use, like ‘reinforced’, ‘compounded’, ‘furthered’, and so on.

An example: imagine a student’s previous paragraph explored the majesty of the natural world and their next paragraph hopes to explore the depiction of quietude. They might therefore use this transitional sentence to connect the two ideas: ‘This sense of natural majesty is furthered by the poet’s depiction of quietude’.

The writing now feels far more coherent and seamless; one idea supporting and enriching another. It helps to avoid the essay feeling like a disparate set of only tangentially related thoughts.

Sentence Stem No. 3: Tracking

This desire to create a fluid and coherent response can be further captured by using various tracking sentence stems. (Do you see what I did there?!)

These are sentence stems like:

• As already discussed, ________
• For this reason it could be argued that __________
• This connects to the sense that ________
• This seems to develop the idea that _________

Teaching these to students all help to ensure their argument stays alive throughout the essay. Often students will introduce a key idea in the introduction only to then overlook it for the rest of their response. This can lead to a perception that they’re not really focused on the question or task that’s been set. Tracking helps to direct attention back to the core idea throughout the essay, ensuring there’s a clear and obvious sense that the essay is building on a single line of reasoning.

As with any sentence stem, simply by encouraging students to use them also prompts them to do it in the first place. Therefore, all sentence stems are circular: they give shape to student thinking whilst also prompting that thinking.

Embedding Sentence Stems Into Teaching

These three categories of sentence stems — establishing, transitioning, tracking — all feature heavily in my teaching. They make student writing (and thinking) more rigorous and precise. However, aside from simply telling students about them, how do  I embed them into my teaching?

Broadly, I use a simply three-step process when introducing and using a new sentence stem.

First, I model the sentence stem being used in my own writing. As I do this, I’ll narrate how and why I’m using it as well as what impact I hope the stem will have on my writing. The stem is therefore always connected to something actually being taught that lesson.

Next, I’ll live-model a piece of writing without the specified stem. I’ll explain that my response would be better if I used it and then asked students to help me to decide where and how to include it. This will involve a lot of discussion and crossing out, but it helps students to better appreciate the impact it can have on writing.

Third and finally, I’ll ask students to do some writing on their own, but, this time, get them to use the specified stem. I’ll then provide further models and feedback on how well it has been achieved. In future tasks, I’ll return to the stem, providing further feedback until it is used by habit. At this point, I’ll introduce another, and so on.

And there we have it: the simple sentence, but also — just maybe — the greatest invention of civilisation.