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.
People are born with the ability to rapidly and unconsciously acquire the basic grammar of their spoken native languages. Children quickly learn, for example, that in English sentences are generally structured SUBJECT VERB OBJECT. However, spoken grammar, even that of educated speakers, does not have all that much to do with written grammar. I’ve read that the pauses in someone’s speech rarely coincide with where one would put the periods in written sentences, and of course they rarely have anything to do with where one would put the commas. If a student were following the “A sentence is a complete thought,” rule, “Which is what I said,” could qualify. I’ve heard otherwise well-educated people tell me that, “You put commas where the pauses are,” and their work seems to have commas thrown in randomly, like sprinkles on a cupcake. One might be able to deduce formal written grammar from reading good books and well-written newspapers, but it is impossible to learn it from speech.
Also, refusing to teach grammar really harms people who grew up hearing mostly non-native or non-standard speech patterns. A child who is mostly hearing Ebonics speakers is learning a complex grammar, one that has more and more precise tenses than standard English. It’s just a different grammar than standard English. A child who grows up around standard English speakers and is never taught grammar might be able to fake it as an adult. A child who grows up around people who speak non-standard English or no English at all and is never taught standard English is at a serious disadvantage.
You could say there’s a kind of learned grammar that we pick up by ear (one that, yes, humans are wired to internalize during the process of learning speech, much as baby birds are wired to internalize the local patterns of their species’ birdsong).
To come up with a slightly different analogy, I easily learn melody by listening to it, but I can read music in only the most rudimentary way. When our choir director starts talking about “C-flat” and “quarter rests,” I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about. I’m every bit as much at a disadvantage in the choir room as is a student who comes to the classroom innocent of the difference between a preposition and a relative pronoun. I can follow along and guess the melody (but not the meter) once I’ve heard the first couple of bars, but all the opportunities that would open if I understood the “grammar rules” of music are closed to me.
Speaking is a different language from writing. Writing codes certain patterns of a spoken language, but its code is more rigid and may be quite arbitrary. The rule that says you put a comma between two independent clauses joined with a coordinating conjunction but not between two predicate structures joined with the same conjunction is simply arbitrary. The rule that says the pronoun “which” can be the subject of a sentence under some conditions but not under others is similarly arbitrary.
Ebonics (a dialect of English arising from Southern American English and the Afro-English patois spoken by slaves) is much complicated by a variety of political issues, some of which shift with the times. In the first place, the language spoken in isolated areas of the South retains many features of 17th-century English which have changed or disappeared over the past 300 years. And in the second, the African-influenced version of the dialect has, we are told, picked up certain tenses and inflections from western African languages. Thus to the 20th-century speaker of what we used to call Walter Cronkite English, the dialect sounds at once complex, regional, and archaic.
To tell a person that the language of his or her home is “wrong” is in itself wrong. There is really no right or wrong with language that succeeds in communicating the speaker’s message.
The issue is one of learning a type of code that dominates the written language, of figuring out when it’s appropriate and when other types of codes are appropriate, and of mastering the use of any codes one chooses to engage. A formal study of grammar makes that mastery possible.
I love this post. However, I’m afraid I don’t have a firm grasp on more than verbs, nouns and adjectives; I’ve heard of the other things, and I think I know what they are, but it’s a good thing I’m not an English college professor. LOL. What really makes me crazy is to see what comes out in the newspapers nowadays (especially the small rural editions) and on school billboards, bylines on the news, etc.
THIS is what made my early high school English classes so difficult! I knew basic grammar, but we never truly spent time parsing sentences so that I could understand the structural underpinnings of language. I did, by virtue of my absorption of language through massive reading lists (assigned and personally selected), learn how to string sensible sentences together, but I could never have explained to you how the truly excellent writers created their prose and in what ways my own never stood up against another’s. It wasn’t until I took a great grammar class in college that “frag” and “run-on” notes completely disappeared from my returned papers.
The true mystery here is why on earth I became an English major in the first place. Grammar class wasn’t until my junior year of college … 😉
THIS is what made my early high school English classes so difficult! I knew basic grammar, but we never truly spent time parsing sentences so that I could understand the structural underpinnings of language. I did, by virtue of my absorption of language through massive reading lists (assigned and personally selected), learn how to string sensible sentences together, but I could never have explained to you how the truly excellent writers created their prose and in what ways my own never stood up against another’s. It wasn’t until I took a great grammar class in college that “frag” and “run-on” notes completely disappeared from my returned papers.
The true mystery here is why on earth I became an English major in the first place. That grammar class wasn’t until my junior year of college … 😉
I guess there’s a difference between what English teachers call “grammar” and what biologists call grammar. I work next to people who promote the view that because Bengalese finches structure their songs so that some syllables are more likely to come after other syllables and these patterns are learned, the finches have something awfully close to grammar. (This is in spite of the fact that the song only says one thing: “I’m here! Love me!”)
Also, while you would never call someone’s home language “wrong,” there are many who would. Many of the condemners are important people who decide which students will gain admission to university and which employees to hire and promote. Explicitly teaching formal written grammar, which is the code of academic and business America, helps the people who have been historically excluded from those arenas the most.
@ synapse: That is so well said. This is the real issue: if we internalize the patterns we hear as children (and it appears we do), and if language patterns vary by social class (that appears to be true, too), then children born into socially privileged homes grow up with socially privileged language patterns, which happen to coincide to a large degree with the dominant “standard” pattern. Many of these privilege-speaking kids, experience shows, are no smarter and no more competent than kids whose language marks them as the scions of disadvantaged and poorly educated families. To be fair to all kids, we need to teach them the language patterns (which includes grammar and vocabulary as well as pronunciation) of the dominant class.
Elitist? Yup. But why should a kid not be able to get into a decent school or not be able to get a good job because her speaking and (especially!) writing patterns stand out like a brand on her forehead? It’s simply not right.
Hm. I wonder if, say, a Senegalese finch could get a job in a Bengalese finch flock? 😉
I’m using an old notebook with pages left in it for my current classes. Curious, I flipped back to the front to see which era this was from, exactly, to find that some of my lecture notes from my favorite grammar class ever were inscribed therein. I had to share:
“Language is rule governed behavior.”
“A grammar is a hypothesis or theory about the rules a native speaker has in his head that he uses to produce and interpret utterances.”
It is possible to provide students a list of words, such as “which” and “because”, that helps them recognize a dependent clause. This tendency is the source of 90% of sentence fragments, as 20 years of teaching writing has taught me.
@ Terri: True. They must learn the relative pronouns and subordinating conjunctions. However, if they don’t know what a relative clause is, then they think “Which of the puppies has the nicest personality?” and “Which way do we go to find the train station?” are sentence fragments. They are not.
I don’t know how many students have told me that you can’t start a sentence with “because” (you can!) and you can’t start a sentence with a preposition (even though that’s wrong, for other reasons it would be good if they how to recognize a preposition).
Handing them a list without explaining the underlying theoretical structure doesn’t help them.