Funny about Money

So the li’l community college students have handed in their first batch of final, final, FINAL most-brilliant-thing-they-ever wrote essays. A few are surprisingly good. Most are unsurprisingly adequate, and a few evince some real challenges with language. Mercifully, so far none of them is flunking (exactly), and I’ve only got about four or five more papers to read.

Teaching students about writing has its challenging moments in an institutional world controlled by educators who are convinced that learning how language actually works does nothing to help students develop strong writing skills. Having made a living as a writer and, later, as an editor, I can testify from personal experience to the wrong-headedness of that idea. Most of my writing style has evolved specifically because I learned a lot about grammar and language in grade school, middle school, and high school. Over the years, I consciously applied knowledge of grammar and sentence structure to my own writing by way of developing a specific style, one designed to be moderately complex but not ornate. Though in my old age I often drop a letter or a word as my fingers fly over the keyboard, I rarely make a grammatical or structural error that is not a typo.

I believe that students are well served by a strong grasp of their native language’s grammar and style. But that’s something few of them learn.

After the chair of my old department at the West campus proposed and got approval for a course titled “Grammar and Style for Writers and Teachers,” the dean of the College of Education paid her a visit and said to her, “I wish you would not teach grammar to education majors.”

No joke.

So what you have, all you taxpayers out there, are teachers of English who do not know how to describe the workings of the English language. They do not know its conventions, they do not know where its conventions came from, and they have no idea how to teach your children how to form a sentence at once technically correct and graceful.

Inside the classroom, it means that you (the instructor) have no vocabulary to use in speaking with the students about issues they need to understand. There’s no way to speak easily and meaningfully with them about language and grammar (of any sort: traditional, structural, transformational, whatEVER)…because they don’t know the words to describe these things. Neither, we might add, did their previous teachers, being graduates of colleges that quite deliberately keep budding K-12 teachers in the dark.

So. Let us say I want to ask a class of bright young students to refrain from writing sentence fragments. I give them, as an example, this typical utterance:

Which is the main drawback to teenage drinking.

How do I explain that this is not a complete sentence? I’m speaking to people who may not know what a subject and a verb are, but more to the point in this case, I can’t easily explain to them that this is a fragment because it is a subordinate clause, and that we know it’s a subordinate clause because it begins with a relative pronoun.

When I asked my students why this utterance is a sentence fragment, one of them said, “Because it starts with a preposition.”

Understand: quite a few of them have been told they must never start a sentence with a preposition, but none of them seem to know what a preposition is. One reported that she had been told never to start a sentence with because, because it’s a preposition.

Because it starts with a preposition.
Because it starts with a preposition, my teacher said it is an incorrect sentence.

How do I tell them which of these is a sentence fragment and why? How do I tell them what patterns to look for when they don’t know what a preposition is, they don’t know what a subordinating conjunction is, they don’t know what a relative pronoun (or any kind of pronoun) is, they don’t know what an independent clause is, and they don’t know what a dependent clause is?

And, without using the terms “relative pronoun,” “interrogative pronoun,” and “adjective,” how do I explain which of these is a sentence fragment, and why?

Which is what I was trying to say.
Which of the puppies has the nicest personality?
Which way do we go to find the train station?

The current theory has it that somehow humans are born hard-wired with the grammatical structure of their native language, and so you don’t need to instruct them in it. That accepted as a given, obviously neither you nor your students need a vocabulary with which to discuss these matters. Instead, we’re told that the way to teach students to write is to make them write. And write. And write. The more they write, the accepted wisdom goes, the better they write.

Well, no.

The more you write badly, the more bad copy you churn out. When you don’t understand what you’re doing, all you can do is grope around in the dark. You have no way to improve your skill because you have no tools, no knowledge with which to improve. And no, grammar is not hard-wired into the human brain. It is learned in infancy by listening to the people around you. When the people around you speak a dialect—as, believe it or not, many Southwesterners do (oh, yes, Virginia: there is a cowboy dialect!)—you learn the grammar of that dialect. If you grew up in darkest Arizona, for example, something like I never saw them two mountain lions until they were right on top of me rings true. That is your hard-wired grammar.

And if no one ever teaches you how to speak about language, you’re unlikely to learn how to express that statement in lingo appropriate to the college or the white-collar office job.

What it means for a college writing instructor is that we’re left empty-handed of any tools with which to teach our subject matter. We are effectively hamstrung. There’s no way you can help students develop their writing skills without some common language you can use to discuss those skills!

To coin a Southwesternism: it’s the stupidest damnfool thing I ever heard.