You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

You've got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium's
Liable to walk upon the scene

A recent letter to the editor in The Idaho Statesman made what might seem to many a fairly reasonable request:

“The Statesman proudly promotes ‘5 things you can use’ that are found in the newspaper. I’d settle for just one: good grammar.”

Yet how loaded those last two words can be—three syllables that can spark a few linguistic and pedagogical powder kegs. Presumably the author of the letter is talking about grammar that follows the rules of Standard Written English, or SWE. This is a dialect, one of several that we have in English, and all the dialects follow grammatical conventions and norms. None of the dialects is necessarily good or bad, none better or worse than another (all can be good in the sense that they follow their own norms). However, SWE is the major dialect, the one most often used by people in positions of influence, and when people talk about “good grammar,” they usually mean the grammatical norms of SWE.

We can certainly debate this issue, but I’m not here arguing against the idea of SWE as “good grammar.” Even if I might not agree with the positioning of one dialect over another, I would be lax in my job as a teacher if I did not promote and teach the norms of the main dialect—“good grammar” is a requirement for students, both inside and outside of the university. [This does not mean I think the topic unworthy of conversation—on the contrary, I think we should talk more about how we value and consider dialects in English. Just not in this space at this time. However, I’ll recommend David Foster Wallace’s article “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” from Harper’s (April 2001), as one interesting take on the topic.]

Instead of considering why we privilege a certain dialect and its grammar, what I want to focus on is the how of teaching that grammar. Educators have long made suggestions about the best way to help students understand how language operates—sometimes those suggestions complement one another, and other times they offer up starkly contrasting views of a classroom. For instance, some would argue (and I’m guessing that the letter writer from above might be in this camp), that students need to be given explicit or formal instruction (and practice) in the rules of grammar, what some would call the “skill and drill” approach. Students should learn, often through worksheets, to recognize and name independent clauses and dependent clauses, and learn how to find misplaced modifiers. Others would counter that suggestion and argue that grammar must be learned in a writing context, must in fact not be brought to a writer’s attention until after a piece of writing has been drafted and revised for focus and organization. Grammar is then part of the editing process, a refinement of the piece of writing.

For an argument against the formal, direct instruction of grammar, we can drop back to 1963 and find one that pulls no punches:

    In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and
    teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teaching of formal
    grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in
    composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing. (Braddock, et al. 37-38)

Patrick Hartwell cites this quotation in his 1985 article “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” and he offers no counter to the claim. Formal grammar instruction does not yield the results teachers hope for.

Yet, the lack of evidence regarding the benefits of formal instruction does not mean that grammar can be picked up implicitly— giving students enough time to write and revise and discover what they want to say does not mean they automatically gain an understanding of how language works. As Lynn Sams argues:

[T]he “in-context” approach to grammar advocated today has negligible impact upon writing. It consists of little more than guided application of rules that teachers seem mysteriously to pull out of a hat in order to correct errors they detect in a piece of writing. (57)

Sams compares the in-context approach to teaching “grammar in a vacuum” (63), and says, “Both traditional and in-context approaches to grammar instruction fail for exactly the same reason: they treat grammar as something that exists apart from and outside the writing process itself” (57). Both have “negligible” effects on writers.

How then to navigate between this Scylla and Charybdis of pedagogies? We’d like students to neither wreck against unyielding, decontextualized exercises nor spin about in the whirlpool of their prose, looking for a handhold.

What Sams advises is to hold discussions on grammar throughout the course of a class, and, instead of treating grammar as a series of lessons to be learned, emphasize the way that grammar illustrates the relationships between words and phrases and clauses in sentences. Grammar then becomes a study of what is possible for a writer, and is part and parcel of the writing process. In her classes, Sams focuses on sentence patterns and the parts that make up those patterns (subject, linking/transitive/intransitive verb, direct object, indirect object, subject complement, object complement, adjectival, adverbial). Sams spends part of her class time examining various sentences and wants students to “’see’ groups of words as moveable and replaceable parts, and [to] understand the changes in meaning and emphasis that occur by adding, deleting, rearranging, and reforming the parts” (61). Martha Kolln does much the same thing in Rhetorical Grammar, and I have been following her lead in my classes.

For instance, here are Kolln’s seven basic sentence patterns:

1. Subject Linking Verb (Be) Adverbial

Someone is in the kitchen.

2. Subject Linking Verb (Be) Subject Complement

Dinah is hungry. (Adjective)

The cook is a former wrestler. (Noun phrase)

3. Subject Linking Verb Subject Complement

This pickle tastes sour.

4. Subject Intransitive Verb

The crowd roared.

5. Subject Transitive Verb Direct Object

The waiter hit the customer.

6. Subject Transitive Verb Indirect Object Direct Object

The busboy threw the bartender a corkscrew.

7. Subject Transitive Verb Direct Object Object Complement

I considered the restaurant uninviting.

These are the building blocks for writers, the basic templates for all their sentences. By offering students these patterns, and suggesting how adjectivals and adverbials can be added to them, teachers give students the opportunity to create. (And I’m still playing around with analogies that can help students consider grammatical relationships: the parts of each pattern represent the immediate family of a sentence, but you can also invite in cousins and in-laws; the parts here are like players on a football team—you need a certain number on the line for each play, but you can also put other players in motion, and work with different formations.)

Also, a discussion on the relationship(s) between parts of a sentence can easily turn to a discussion about the relationship(s) between sentences in paragraphs and the relationship(s) between paragraphs in an essay. (Richard Coe’s Toward a Grammar of Passages offers some thoughtful work on the subject.) Students begin to consider how all the parts of an essay relate to one another—word to word, phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph.

In addition, when talking about sentence patterns, students notice that there is no punctuation between the parts of these sentence patterns. None is necessary. Plus, there’s the extra joy that comes from realizing that a writer can double up a sentence part (compound subjects, compound verbs) without adding punctuation (Subject and Subject Transitive Verb Direct Object). When, however, we drop in adjectivals and adverbials, our punctuation must match the moves we make. (Please see earlier editions of Word Works for some thoughts about the “hierarchy of punctuation”: WW81 and WW109—the sentiment there is similar to the one here: “The least productive thing a writer can do to improve punctuation skills would be to try memorizing the rules out of a handbook. Instead, they should learn how to pay attention to how their sentences are focused, how the sentence parts relate to one another. Punctuation is not just window dressing. It is an indicator of the writer's sense of sentence structure, focus, and emphasis.”)

For me, talking about these sentence parts and patterns has been the best route between the traditional and in-context approaches to grammar. And, it’s important to note that while I am having these conversations with students, they are also drafting papers. Oftentimes, discussion about a certain pattern can be linked with an example from a student’s essay. Students can find these patterns in their own writing, and then they have an investment in discovering how to complicate the patterns.

A Missed Escape

Here would be a good place to duck out of this essay. (For me, not you.) I’ve made some references to work in the field, considered the issue of grammar on a fairly broad scale, and offered a suggestion for rethinking some teaching strategies. A day’s work, perhaps, but also a little too neat. Let me, then, take the risk of being a little messy.

Baseball over Bicycles

Some readers might pause at the listing of terms above, fearing that students will get bogged down in the language: “object complement,” “transitive verb.” They worry that focusing on the patterns and parts, even if done while in the process of composing essays, still places grammar outside of the writing context. Oftentimes, when people talk about learning to write in context, they compare writing with another activity, like riding a bicycle or shooting a basketball. Grammar will be a part of the writing activity, a learned reflex, like flicking your wrist on a jumper.

Let me offer another simile—writing is like hitting a baseball. For instance, a player can learn to recognize what a curve ball looks like coming out of the pitcher's hand by hitting curve balls one after another. Now, in a game, no one will stand there and throw a hundred curveballs to a batter, but if a batter has practiced hitting curve balls, s/he will be better prepared should one come over the plate in a game. In the same way, if a student spends time examining the relationships between sentence parts, and knows that a nonrestrictive participle must be related to the subject of the main sentence, then s/he will be better prepared to notice, "Having walked five miles, the campground was a welcome sight" is problematic. As the player can hit a curveball, the student can revise: "Having walked five miles, I was relieved to see the campground."

Also, the best hitters usually are incredibly knowledgeable about what they are doing. Listen to how Tony Gwynn or Rod Carew or Ted Williams talk(ed) about hitting. Yes, they relied on a good deal of instinct at the plate and responded with split-second timing, but only because they had studied and studied the moves and habits of pitchers and baseballs. Gwynn was notorious for the time he spent in front of a video machine. I think the same holds true for writing—talking about and working with different types of sentences helps transfer that knowledge into writing situations.

My Job? Your Job?

All this is well and good, other readers might say, if you’re an English teacher. True, we in English historically have the pleasure of focusing most on the way language works. Yet, if we are going to encourage students to think about their writing in terms of relationships, it is even more important that all teachers acknowledge the relationships that are of particular importance to their disciplines, and their classrooms. For instance, do essays and articles in a discipline favor certain sentence patterns? Is there an abundance of compound sentences? Or complex? Do you, as a teacher, favor certain patterns? These questions can be raised and addressed with students, giving them an opportunity to see what they are being asked to create in their writing.

Granted, asking everybody to join in at this stage of the educational game is less than ideal, and Sams calls for a better plan: “We need to recognize that writing proficiency develops over a period of twelve years or more, and instead of having every teacher try to address all aspects of writing every year in haphazard and band-aid fashion, we need to implement a sequenced approach to grammar that is designed to build students’ competence gradually” (64). She even lays out a plan detailing what students can study each year from sixth grade to the first year of college. It is, as she says, “ambitious, but possible.” Ideally, we will someday be able to follow such a plan. Until that day, though, the more teachers who offer students the chance to consider grammar as a collection of choices that can be made while composing, the better.

Attitude (or The Relevance of the Title)

Still other readers (and this will be my last group of readers as I fear I might be running out) might be curious as to why I haven’t talked about split infinitives or prepositions at the end of sentences. After all, when I ask my students what grammar is, they usually offer up a list of rules that address just those issues:

   -Don’t start a sentence with “And” or “But” or “Because.”
            -Don’t split an infinitive
            -Don’t use “which” for restrictive clauses, use “that”
            -Don’t end a sentence with a preposition

All these admonitions to writers are what many people consider grammar. But, I find these rules problematic for a couple of reasons.

One, many of these rules really aren’t rules. Edwin Battistella offers the term “grammatical superstition.” For instance, Battistella describes how the warning about starting a sentence with “And” has no grounding, and many folks have pointed out that the caution against split infinitives is a holdover from Latin, a language whose infinitives were unsplittable. Several of our so-called grammatical rules, then, are unconnected to how our language operates. (See also Lesson Two in Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, by Joseph Williams. Williams also has a nice piece on how we recognize errors based on context, “The Phenomenology of Error.”)

Does this mean you must toss such rules out? Nope. I’m still a stickler for the that/which distinction, even though I encounter so many authors who ignore it (George Orwell is the most recent find). But, I am upfront with my students about my reading habits. I am particular, I say, about using “that” for restrictive clauses. And I think there is nothing wrong with asking students to follow particulars, provided the request is explicit. If you don’t want students to boldly split infinitives—be clear about it. These are the types of guidelines students should have, especially if you think a preposition is not a good thing to end a sentence with. Or, if you think fragments will not work, say so. Preferably in writing. That’s another relationship I stress in class—between a writer and a reader. If a reader has certain conventions that she wants followed, and if that reader has the power to evaluate writing, then a conscientious writer will most likely follow those conventions.

However, over and above the conversation about which “rules” we might ask students to follow is the larger question about the pedagogical benefit of rules. The main reason I like the work from Sams and Kolln is that I find a focus on patterns and relationships more productive for writers than a focus on rules, and my students seem to agree. Grammar can show what is possible. It is about what a writer can do, rather than what a writer can’t. You can build sentences that will best express your ideas, you can create and shape and refine your thoughts through the grammatical choices you make. That’s empowering for a writer, a better approach I think than having writers fret over a laundry list of possible errors or try to decipher rules that come at the end of a drafting cycle. That’s the positive attitude I want to punctuate in class—to bring joy up to the maximum. That’s the approach I want students to take with grammar.

Works Cited

Battistella, Edwin. “Bad Grammar Isn’t Always What You Think.” The Vocabula Review 6.2 (2004).
16 February 2004 <http://www.vocabula.com/2004/VRFEB04Battistella.asp>.

Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written Composition.
Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1963.

Coe, Richard. Toward a Grammar of Passages. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP,1988.

Gorsline, Christie. Letter. The Idaho Statesman. 6 Feb. 2004.

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.” Cross-Talk In Comp
Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997: 183-212.

Kolln, Martha. Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects. 4^th Edition. New
York: Longman, 2003.

Sams, Lynn. “How to Teach Grammar, Analytical Thinking, and Writing: A Method That Works.”
English Journal (January 2003): 57-65.

Wallace, David Foster. “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” Harper’s
302 (April 2001): 39-58.

Williams, Joseph. “The Phenomenology of Error.” College Composition and Communication. 32
(1981): 152-168.

- - - . Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. New York, Longman, 2003.

If you have comments or questions on this piece or others, or suggestions for future topics, please call or email: 426-3585 or michaelmattison@boisestate.edu