The Erasure of the Sentence.

This article examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s-the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining--and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. The usefulness of these sentence-based rhetorics was never disproved, but a growing wave of anti-formalism, antibehaviorism, and anti-empiricism within English-based composition studies after 1980 doomed them to a marginality under which they still exist today. The result of this erasure of sentence pedagogies is a culture of writing instruction that has very little to do with or to say about the sentence outside of a purely grammatical discourse.