This article echoes Robert J. Connors’s call for a reexamination of sentence pedagogies in composition teaching and offers an explanation of the unsolved mystery of why sentence combining improves student writing, using insights provided by work in contemporary research in linguistics and in language processing. Based the same insights, I argue that we invite words and phrases, the true members of sentences, to important positions in writing classes and describe practical methods for doing so.

ESL writers present a common dilemma to writing centers-the desire for sentencelevel interventions from their tutors.Our staff often experience such interventions as contradicting the aim of writing centers, formulated by Stephen North