Excerpt:
How closely Jenny models her own writing on Nabokov’s sentence structure, and how much power that gives her writing! Like Nabokov, she has implied a history within the parentheses. She has told the reader something about her mother and something about herself. She has set a tone that is slightly distant, slightly wry, that suggests the world and her place in it. She has punctuated accurately as well. Jenny was able, without further instruction, to see how powerful this sentence is. It leaps off the page. This moment demonstrated several things to us. It took the teaching out of my hands and moved it from direct instruction to the idea that students have an apprenticeship relation with great authors, even at the level of sentence structure. It showed students what it is like to be in a relationship with the ideas and language of literature. It gave Jenny, and the class when we shared it, a whole new idea of the purpose of grammar. It suggested grammar as inquiry and as craft.
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