What is sentence combining?
Students are presented with short sentences, and they must then put all of the ideas together in a complex sentence. To be able to do that successfully, they really have to know a lot of the different writing conventions, and so it’s an effective exercise to increase writing fluency. Of course sentence combining is not the only approach to teaching writing, and shouldn’t be the only way — the goal is for these exercises to engage the students, and to be a part of the whole process of combining several different approaches. We need to encourage students to think about what they read, to engage in meaningful conversation — especially for high school students.
