July-August 2008

Whenever I use grammatical terms in my writing classes, I sense an atmosphere of bewilderment creeping into the classroom like a dense fog that, while it may not obscure my students' vision, clouds their understanding of what I'm saying. Often it is accompanied by a palpable feeling of hostility along with a certain amount on not-very-subtle eye-rolling. "Here we go again," they seem to be saying, "More grammatical gobbledygook that has nothing to do with anything real."

It isn't that I am bombarding my students with sophisticated grammatical terms. The use of labels such as preposition and adjective is enough to evoke the glazed looks. Obviously, these terms are not being taught as tools for understanding how language works or, if they are, have been relegated to the part of the brain that is used for storing useless information that is best left to rot. Indeed, once when I mentioned prepositional phrases, an alert student (who had perhaps had too much caffeine that day) blurted out, "What's a preposition?" When I turned the question back on the class, nobody could answer it.

Obviously, knowing the names and definitions of parts of speech or being able to tell the difference between an indedependent clause and a dependent clause does not guarantee that one will write effectively. Moreover, some effective writers might not do very well on an objective test covering definitions of grammatical terms.

However, knowledge of these terms, as well as some familiarity with their definitions, is extremely helpful in understanding how language works. This understanding is essential for developing writing skills. I've had some students who write rather well but admit that they could not parse their sentences using grammatical terminology. Nevertheless, conversations with these students reveal that they have a reasonably good idea of how language works – how words and phrases function to create sentences. I suspect that they have, at some subconscious level, a memory of some elementary school English class in which they were exposed to grammatical terms. They may have forgotten the details, but they remember how to apply them.

I worked for more than twenty years with a woman who told me that everything she knew about grammar she learned decades ago from her sixth-grade English teacher. She was my editorial assistant (I considered her more a partner than an assistant), and she is a good writer and a superb editor. She maintained that she could not teach writing, partly because she did not know the grammatical terms anymore. She knew how to write, and she could edit other people's writing, but she felt severely limited in her ability to explain the process to someone else. I was the grammarian and teacher, so she gladly let me take responsibility for conducting the corporate workshops for writers, yet the truth is that lodged somewhere in her brain was a knowledge of grammar (and of the terminology) that she had acquired years ago. Indeed, I am convinced that she could have covered my workshops very well if it had become necessary; all she would have needed was to brush up on some terminology, to bring to the fore what she already knew. In fact, when this lady occasionally disputed my editorial judgment, she usually won the point by calling forth the knowledge that she claimed not to have.

By contrast, every student I have had who writes poorly, who cannot put together a coherent sentence, has been almost utterly ignorant of grammar and grammatical terms. Explaining what causes the incoherence is frustrating for both of us, for I must constantly interrupt the lesson with an explanation of a rule, which, in turn, requires me to backtrack even further to the definition of a term that I had to use to state the rule.

Consider the task of teaching someone to drive. Until the learner knows what the accelerator and brake are called and what they are used for, the lesson cannot go very far. Moreover, if the student tries to use the accelerator when the brakes should be applied, a crash is inevitable. Of course, the practiced driver no longer consciously needs to think about the gas pedal, the brake, and their functions – but he or she has that knowledge. Furthermore, the experienced driver learns subtleties of use, such as how to ease up on the gas or pump the brakes under certain conditions.

The analogy applies to teaching, learning, and fine-tuning writing. It's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to teach students how to write if they don't know the names for and functions of the types of words that "drive" their sentences. Clearly, such lack of knowledge also handicaps the student. And any effort to refine the writing – to make it better or more coherent – will be limited by the writer's lack of understanding of the "tools" of writing.

Some clever readers might want to carry our analogy further to prove that knowledge of grammar and grammatical terminology is not needed. "We want to write, not to be grammarians," they will say. "We want to be able to drive the car, not to be mechanics." That's true enough, but do you want to have to turn your sentences over to a mechanic (editor) every time they break down? Or, as some people now try to do, do you want to rely on a fallible, automated program such as grammar-check to detect and correct any errors? If so, how do you evaluate the suggestions that grammar-check makes if you don't understand the vocabulary that it uses?

Let's not take the analogy too far, anyway. Learning to write is more difficult than learning to drive; language is more complex and subtle in many respects than an internal combustion engine is. Perhaps only grammarians and English teachers need to know what gerunds are and how they function, but anyone who wants to develop reasonable competence with the written word must also have a basic understanding of how language works. To acquire this understanding, we need to know the terms used to discuss words and their functions.

Not very long ago, instruction in parts of speech and other grammatical terms was an integral part of elementary school education in language. It formed a basis for more sophisticated instruction in middle and high school – for example, exercises in diagramming, which showed how the parts fit together to express a written thought (a sentence). These tireless (and often tiresome, to many students) drills trained us in how to put the verbal pieces together into coherent written thoughts. No matter how much many of us protested at the sheer academic silliness, many of us were later grateful that we had endured this ordeal. We may have gradually forgotten some of the terminology, but we were able to create coherent sentences more easily and quickly than were those who did not have this training.

Nowadays, such instruction is rare – and we wonder why students are deficient in language skills. We shouldn't be surprised. They do not have the tools; in fact, they don't even know what the tools are called. Well, to use another metaphor, if you don't know what a screwdriver, saw, and hammer are – if you don't know one from the other or what each is used for – you'll have a devil of a time building a book case.