3.8: Good Writers Must Know Grammatical Terminology

Author: Hannah J. Rule, English, University of South Carolina

As an English teacher, I have become used to dodging eye contact at parties when a grammar question inevitably comes up, as heads crane around to request my discourse on which form of whom or who can be deemed proper or definitively correct. It’s not just expected that I know which form is eternally right (yet another bad idea about writing: that language is an unchanging system of absolute rights and wrongs), but also that I have a range of precise terminology to define the relevant grammatical parts. I don’t; I don’t always have that terminology at hand. Partygoers are not impressed by my method of listening to the options to see which sounds most fitting or even beautiful. They just expect me to have the names.

This thirst for grammar terms is fairly common, fueled perhaps in part by the enduring stereotype of the English teacher as grammar police or by the ways many imagine grammar lessons in school. The art of sentence diagramming, for instance, is predicated upon seeing and naming grammatical parts—subject, object, adjective, verb, article—and knowing which of those parts earns a slanted, dividing, or straight line. And though sentence diagramming is now mostly a relic, some nevertheless still believe in this kind of knowledge. The vast numbers of hands that go up in my college courses when I ask who did grammar worksheets on parts of speech in high school may be proof enough of this belief’s endurance. The grammar worksheet hangs on, though, only by virtue of a bad idea about writing: that good writers must know grammatical terminology.

It’s pretty bad, and a bit strange, that some believe writers should be able to circle their every adjective. But it’s worse (and stranger still) when grammatical identification is invoked and passed as itself a sign—even the singular indicator—of a good writer. This view is suggested in a 2013 CNBC News article, “Why Johnny Can’t Write, and Why Employers are Mad,” in which author Kelly Holland laments the “inadequate communication skills” of today’s job seekers. Holland’s piece is meant to evoke Newsweek’s 1975 article, “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” a piece that catalyzed a literacy crisis in the public imagination, inspired “back to basics” sentiments and, likely, the renewed persistence of the grammar worksheet. Though Holland’s piece hits some familiar notes (indeed, yet more bad ideas about writing: that educators aren’t teaching writing; that technology is destroying the written word), it isn’t quite the same old song.

Significantly, the employer sentiments about writing summarized in the article generally match those of English educators: that writing should be the focus of education, that skills in organization and context-specific rhetorical strategies are the most important, and that new employees will likely require ongoing workplace training in writing in order to develop fluency in professional discourse. Nowhere a whiff of concern about what a predicate is. In spite of this complex vision of proficient written communication, Holland begins her piece by reinforcing the idea that good writers can be measured by grammar-identification knowledge. “Can you tell a pronoun from a participle,” Holland begins, “use commas correctly in long sentences; describe the difference between its and it’s? If not, you have plenty of company in the world of job seekers.” Holland’s barometer is wholly, even comically, inaccurate. It prioritizes identifying and defining, abilities that have no bearing on the complex arts of organization, persuasion, and effectiveness in writing.

It’s not that I’m against cultivating the ability to see a pronoun or against learning some of the general conventions of comma use. But what I am against is the still pervasive belief that these abilities are of significant value. Both English educators and the employers in Holland’s article generally know this: conscious knowledge about grammar, parts of speech, and punctuation usage rules do not help anyone, in the long run, to perform that knowledge in writing. An effective writer cannot be measured by her ability to identify and define grammatical parts. This is not the same as saying that writers should never learn to identify direct objects or spot a dependent clause, but rather that this kind of knowledge is tremendously, detrimentally overvalued.

For a long time (that is, hundreds and hundreds of years), grammar was studied without any concern for, or interest in, its relationship to writing proficiencies. As noted by Constance Weaver, a leading voice on grammar in English education, grammar was a matter only of mental discipline and social refinement for most of its instructional history. It was only rather recently (that is, around the 1960s) that English educators began to focus much more extensively on writing instruction and, in turn, to question exactly how the study of grammar may or may not help make students better writers. And what was discovered is not only that mental discipline alone isn’t a great rationale for its pursuit, but also that teaching grammar in traditional ways is actually detrimental to writing. Writing researchers have repeatedly shown that formal grammar instruction—those worksheets, diagramming drills, or exercises that emphasize the study of subjects, predicates, objects, and clauses with an emphasis on terminology—is fruitless and futile.

Any value attached to knowledge of grammatical terminology for its own sake is thus based upon fully outdated ideas about what the study of grammar might do. An individual’s ability to define grammatical parts is perhaps at best a kind of neat party trick, but ultimately not that important and absolutely not related to one’s abilities or potentials as a writer.

Conscious, definitional knowledge of grammatical terms simply doesn’t impact processes of writing. Doing language in our everyday lives—crafting a meaningful text message to a crush, or penning an elegy for a departed family member—isn’t influenced by deliberate, memorized rules about the right form of who or whom. It doesn’t have a thing to do with knowing when you’re writing a noun or a participle phrase. That is, it doesn’t reflect how individuals come to know and perform language. Research has shown that complex grammar knowledge is already in us, in every one of us, in both shared and idiosyncratic ways. As English professor Patrick Hartwell has written, the “grammar in our heads”—the largely untaught, subconscious tacit system of grammar installed in us all at an early age—is precisely “how we make our life through language.” But we can’t really talk about that fund of knowledge, aside from performing it as we speak and write. Grammarians or sticklers might need the names, but writers don’t.

A better idea about writing is rather that good writers know how to do grammar to myriad effects. The most useful grammar knowledge is much less explicit than naming, formed through exposure to language and its many options, arrangements, and infinite combinations and built upon our intuitive, tacit experiences with sentences. Leading English pedagogues have shown that the best way to increase grammatical effectiveness and style in students’ writing is by having them study the choices writers have made in compelling mentor texts and then practice making those moves in their own writing. As Patricia A. Dunn puts it, students must develop their grammar and sentence chops through engagement in writing they care about, not through the estrangement of decontextualized drills and memorization.

Jeff Anderson, a middle school English teacher and author of many books on teaching grammar and editing, teaches grammatical concepts in context through processes of dialogic questing and discovery, asking students to analyze and intuit syntactical patterns in a range of example texts. This approach builds upon the research-validated claim that writers deploy grammar knowledge unconsciously and through exposure, not through the ability to label parts of speech or other grammatical constructs. Being able to see certain grammatical concepts, like independent clauses or modifiers, is essential to the kind of discovery approach to grammar that others and I advocate. But any work on terms and identification is only valuable insofar as it helps writers meaningfully engage in the complex craft of writing.

Perhaps what has ultimately kept grammar names alive in spite of the research about formal instruction is that writing teachers haven’t much articulated the ways this particular kind of grammar knowledge doesn’t matter. Once formal grammar instruction was debunked in our literature, some writing teachers have tended to, in Martha Kolln’s terms, “avoid the G-word” altogether, suggesting instead that simply “practice, practice, practice” in writing is the key. But writing teachers do a disservice, too, if we think we can or should avoid grammar altogether. Grammar is an internalized, complex human system we all mysteriously acquire and continuously reshape through experience. And it’s that rich experience with the magnificent systems of grammar—the discovery and dialogue about compelling examples combined with lots and lots of thoughtful practice in writing—that matters and makes a difference to writing development, not grammatical terminology.

Further Reading

To learn more about classroom approaches to grammar that support writing development by prioritizing intuition, experience with language, and grammatical choices in the context of student’s own writing, see especially Jeff Anderson’s Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop and his Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer’s Workshop (both from Stenhouse Publishers), as well as Harry Noden’s Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing (Heinemann). Constance Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context (Boynton/Cook) also provides a detailed approach to teaching grammar through immersion, inquiry, and discovery in student’s own reading and writing, an approach supported by a thorough history of grammar and the failures of traditional grammar instruction.

Patricia A. Dunn’s argument for engagement in meaningful writing experiences rather than estrangement through decontextualized grammar drills and memorization is part of a larger argument for authentic writing instruction. For more on authentic writing perspectives, see the blog, Teachers, Profs, Parents: Writers Who Care. Hosted and maintained by a working group of the Conference on English Education, Writers Who Care features engaging posts emphasizing the importance of ownership, motivation, purpose, and real-world writing experiences. For another specific vision of teaching writing authentically, see Kelly Gallagher’s Write like This: Teaching Real-World Writing through Modeling and Mentor Texts (Stenhouse Publishers). See also Martha Kolln’s article “Rhetorical Grammar: A Modification Lesson” (English Journal) for more on failing to address the “G-word” in teaching writing.

Keywords

grammar instruction, grammar, pedagogical grammar, rhetorical grammar, writing instruction

Author Bio

Hannah J. Rule is an assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches college writers and future teachers of writing and English Language Arts. She practices and studies the teaching of grammar through visualization, intuition, imitation, and play. Hannah’s research on writing pedagogy and descriptions of her college courses are available at hannahjrule.com.