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I wish I could tell you more about that night, but it’s kind of blurry. What do I remember? My father’s voice, “Mommy passed away.” I know I cried, but for how long I don’t remember. My boyfriend was there; he only heard my end of the conversation. He drove me home from college. I guess that took a couple of hours. There was a box of tissues on my lap, but I didn’t use any. He smoked a cigarette at one point, and opened up a window. The black air rushed in and settled on me like a heavy cloak.

Notice how flat and largely unembellished these statements are: “He drove me home from college”; “He smoked a cigarette at one point, and opened the window.” Here again it is useful if you have a little technical vocabulary, but you don’t need much.

It will help if you know the difference between coordinate sentences, in which everything is treated at one level of importance, and subordinate sentences in which some things depend upon and are set up as less important than other things. This writer and her sentences are shell-shocked by an unexpected tragedy that renders everything that happens the same, basically meaningless. The passage contains virtually no subordination and instead a number of short declarative sentences.

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Try This 2.8: Identify the Features of “Go To” Sentences

Below are examples of “go to” sentences contributed by colleagues at our institution, taken from their own professional writing. What features do you see as distinguishing the shapes of these sentences, and so what? That is, (1) describe the shape of each sentence, and (2) suggest what the shapes “say” about the kind of thinker each writer is, and why you think so.

a. Earlier steel studies compared work, family, and community in ethnically defined neighborhoods surrounding the mills—in the case of Bethlehem within the “shadow of the steel stacks—until the lure of suburbia disrupted working class living patterns, changed neighborhood ethnic composition, and dispersed extended families, thereby complicating the very nature and definition of a steel community.” (Susan Clemens, Professor of History)

b1. But there is another burden which, although also strongly related to the external political and historical events of the time, is internal to the text itself.

b2. But it is evident that, after the arguments that Adorno presents against Kierkegaard have been examined, Adorno’s claims have less to do with Kierkegaard than with a desire to read something else into and against Kierkegaard. (Marcia Morgan, Professor of Philosophy)

c1. BCM 441 is a course concerned with the content, presentation, and evaluation of modern biochemistry.

c2. It is through metabolism that stored nutrients, ingested foods, and the energy of light are converted to complex biomolecules and the energy to drive cellular processes.

c3. As part of the project, Joe and his lab partner performed a pull down assay to detect stable protein-protein interactions, a chemical cross linking assay to detect transient interactions, and then prepared target protein bands for analysis by mass spectrometry. (Keri Colabroy, Professor of Biochemistry)

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Try This 2.9: Find One of Your Own “Go To” Sentences

Locate a sentence in something you have written. Reading for repetition will help you find a characteristic sentence shape. You might try looking for key connecting words, such as “and” or “but” or “however” or “because” or for characteristic ways that your sentences begin and end. Remember that you are not looking for bad examples or to criticize your own writing. You’re looking to identify and understand the sentence shapes you rely on. This exercise is useful to do in small groups. When time allows, we like having students present their “go to” sentence and analysis to the class.

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B. Counterproductive Habits of Mind

Analysis, we have been suggesting, is a frame of mind, a set of habits for observing and making sense of the world. There is also, it is fair to say, an anti-analytical frame of mind