By Chris
Grammar is the structure of a language… esp. the study of the structure of sentences and words [and] of the norms or conventions of usage and communication.
The Oxford English Dictionary
Too often, instructors who decide to teach writing focus minutely on this single element of writing. They correct students’ use of the English language, police their voice, and seek to reproduce their own sense of communicative style. I must admit that when I started teaching, I spent too much time and too much emotional energy worrying over whether students split their infinitives or incorrectly applied the past perfect tense. In part, I picked on grammar because it was the easiest thing to address: either a sentence follows the rule, or it doesn’t. And in the moment, it seemed to me an absolutely fundamental aspect of written communication. I justified this approach by thinking that it didn’t matter how good an idea was, if you confused your reader because you didn’t follow the established rules and conventions.
By concentrating on “fixing” students’ grammar, I often let poor ideas go unscathed. And this absolutely came to haunt me as I read essays carrying empty, insubstantial insights, ornamented with great verb tenses and perfectly placed commas.
One of the most important insights I’ve adopted since joining the Writing-Intensive Program at UGA is that we must service students’ capacity to craft arguments and construct complex ideas before we address the surface-level flourishes that make such ideas legible (or even just easy to read). In part, attention to grammar suggests to students that their discussions are as fully formed as they can be, that they don’t have to work much more to ensure their logical suppositions are sound or that they need to marshal more or better evidence to support their claims. We reinforce an intellectual culture in which students—and people more generally—believe their initial insights to be completely formed, not needing revision or reexamination. These problems with student writing further frustrate the instructor who concatenates feedback on grammar with feedback on argument construction, as students will often treat all feedback as equal and tackle the sentence-level problems first because they see it as the easiest to revise.
Not only does de-prioritizing syntax and mechanics help our students develop their ideas and make strong arguments, it allows us to preserve our students’ voices. Beyond writing pedagogy, a basic principle of teaching is that we must meet students where they’re at. Instructors at most colleges must realize that their students come from diverse backgrounds and communities. And for some people, standard academic English is not a natural vernacular. Furthermore, many of the prime concerns that grammar police carry are the artifacts of an older academic culture that privileged elite modes of communication. However, college admissions has democratized since the 1940s, and the university is no longer the exclusive domain of the Boston Brahmin, New York haute bourgeoisie, or even Atlanta’s patricians. Grammar itself is not the problem, but instructors who conflate style with grammar are.
Instructors may not always realize it, but grammar has become a class signifier that has been used to marginalize students who have not been educated according to their own conceptions of “correct” usage of the language. The case of the split infinitive as a preoccupation among grammar snobs is illustrative. I’m no linguist—and readers should double-check with their neighborhood Department of Linguistics—but the English language is fluid and has been changing since well before the Norman Invasion of the British Isles in 1066. But sometime in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writing instructors decided to bring English grammar in closer alignment with the Latin, which did not allow for split infinitives. Simple reference to Spanish or French makes this clear, where you cannot insert valientemente or hardiment to ir or aller, respectively, the way you can insert boldly to “to go.” One problem that readers might recognize immediately is that we don’t read, speak, or write in Latin. But teaching grammar this way demonstrates to a reader whether the author had proper training in the Classics, which would notably be absent from the industrial education available to members of the working class.
This elitist fixation with the Latinization of English is just one example, but it speaks to a conservative impulse to limit the adaptability of our language. Moreover, it’s a conservative impulse to limit which modes of expression are acceptable and which modes ought to be marginalized or disregarded as unserious.
Apart from the elitism of a hyper-fixation on grammar, sticklers for grammar often have incomplete grasps over the labyrinthine rules that regulate communication in this bastard tongue. Trying to police declensions is another problem that we commonly face. “The plural of octopus is octopi,” is a common first encounter with grammar policing. The problem with correcting declensions as such is that the -us to -i modification is a Latin one, but octopus actually has Greek roots; and so, the absolutely correct declension would be many octopodes. What results is arbitrary policing, where students we suspect don’t have the greatest grasp get far more scrutiny than do students we just assume for whatever cultural reasons will have strong handle on participles.
Grammar is an important element of writing education, but it should by no means be the first or only thing we teach. Not only does it fail to improve essays substantially, grammar policing reinforces power relations that have long been counter-productive in an increasingly democratic—albeit not perfectly accessible—academy.