Names in Search of a Concept: Maturity, Fluency, Complexity, and Growth in Written Syntax

One offshoot of the recent college sentence-combining experiments has been the renewal of the debate over what constitutes mature style, topic of polemic discussion decade ago.1 The best known experiments testing sentence combining in college-the Daiker, Kerek, and Morenberg study at Miami University2 and the Stewart study at the University of New Brunswick3-report gains in as indicated by increases in clause length and T-unit length among students who were formally taught sentence-combining techniques. Three primary assumptions underlie this research: 1) T-unit length and, in particular, clause length are reliable measures of the syntactic skills of older writers; 2) the syntactic maturity of college students is below desirable level; and 3) increased syntactic maturity leads to increased writing effectiveness. The first assumption is based on the research of Kellogg Hunt.4 Hunt's application of transformational grammar to the analysis of syntactic development enabled him to explain how children increasingly' use embedding and deletion transformations to pack more information into less space as they advance through the grades. However, it was Hunt's work in identifying indices of maturity--especially the T-unit--that brought his research wide circulation. He computed the mean clause and T-unit lengths and the mean clause per T-unit ratios for groups of students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades, finding together these measures mark regular stages of development in writing, stages confirmed by several subsequent studies of the prose of schoolchildren.5 Hunt later took the same measurements from eighteen expository essays appearing in Harper's and The Atlantic as a target for less accomplished persons to aim toward.6 Hunt thought the same processes of embedding he had observed through the grades account for the added clause and T-unit length in the prose of skilled adults. He concluded that if the average high school graduate is ever to write like skilled adult, he has nearly as much yet