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The Grumpy Grammarian

A column last month in our local paper by Dorothy Rubin, a professor emeritus of The College of New Jersey, aroused my ire.  In it she reports:  "Studies have shown . . . that studying traditional grammar doesn't help students speak or write better.  It actually may have a negative effect, because the time it takes to teach grammar usually displaces classroom instruction and practice in composition."  Ms. Rubin, whose specialty is education and who has therefore been instrumental in training teachers, apparently believes that traditional grammar should not be taught at all, for she does not question these findings.

Before I respond to this argument, which seems to be the prevailing view throughout public school English departments, I should point out that, in the same column, Ms. Rubin writes:  "In the final stage [of writing], we correct misspellings and focus on word choice and syntax, because we are concerned with obeying the conventions of writing so that our ideas can be understood by the reader."  (Underlines are mine.)

Let me see if I have that straight.  We are not supposed to teach traditional grammar, but students are expected to check their writing for syntax (sentence structure) and for adherence to the conventions of writing – which, I presume, are the traditional principles that we apply to our writing.  How do students do that?  How do they critically examine syntax if they haven't learned the principles of sentence structure, an integral component of traditional grammar?  How do they ensure that their writing follows "the conventions" if they haven't been taught what these conventions are? 

This is a bit like saying that students should check the solutions to their math problems without any knowledge of the traditional principles of mathematics, that they should solve and check a multiplication problem without any knowledge of the times tables.  Indeed, it suggests that teaching the times tables is actually a waste of time because it displaces classrom instruction and practice in solving multiplication problems.  True, in this example, they can get the desired result by using a calculator, but there is no comparable machine that will construct coherent sentences for them.  The machine that does this is called the human brain, and it must be programmed with the principles of grammar just as surely as a calculator must be programmed with the ability to manipulate numbers.

People like Ms. Rubin, who unfortunately constitute a large contingent of public school teachers, sound as if they were traumatized in their youth by having to parse sentences for structure.  Therefore, they teach students that grammar doesn't matter.  How students say what they say does matter, but "traditional grammar" doesn't.  Huh?

"Untraditional grammar" is an oxymoron.  Among the leading definitions of grammar in the American Heritage Dictionary are:  "a normative or prescriptive set of rules setting forth the current standard of usage for pedagogical [i.e., instructional] or reference purposes" (underlines are mine) and "the study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences."  (Note to Ms. Rubin:  The latter definition sounds an awful lot like syntax, one of the items that you say students should check in the final stage of writing.)  When we refer to grammar, we refer (by definition) to the traditional rules of usage and sentence structure.

However, educationists are now asserting that these rules are too prescriptive.  They distract from the process of composition.  How, for heaven's sake, can students write essays if they are worrying about such arcane matters as subject-verb agreement, proper forms of pronouns, the possessive form of nouns, logical placement of modifiers, and so on?  My question is:  How can they write coherent essays if they do not know and understand these principles?  Trying to teach students to write sentences when they cannot tell a subject from a predicate is a bit like teaching a carpenter's apprentice how to build a chair when the apprentice doesn't know the difference between a hammer and a nail – and how each is to be used.

I readily concede that a knowledge of grammar does not, in itself, make students good writers.  And that's all that these studies that Ms. Rubin cites show.   Frankly, I think it's a bit stupid that somebody had to conduct studies to find this out.  An understanding of harmonics and the other principles of music doesn't make people good composers or musicians either, but that's not a reason to omit the traditional principles of music from the education of aspiring musicians.  These principles are the building blocks of music, and no matter what liberties creative artists take with them, the artists are usually aware of what they are.  As someone once observed, we have to know the rules before we can creatively and sensibly break them – or construct variations on them.

Thus, although we know that knowledge of grammar per se does not make someone a good writer, that's no reason to forego teaching traditional grammar.  There's ample empirical evidence that ignorance of grammar makes students bad writers.  Beyond the blatant errors such as confusion of possessive nouns and simple plurals, confusion of the adverb there and the possessive pronoun their, improper forms of verbs ("he don't"), and the like, students who are ignorant of grammar repeatedly write sentences that require translation into traditional English to make sense.

Even when students recognize that their prose is awkward and unclear (and they often do), they are hard-pressed to correct the fault.  Why?  Lacking the ability to dissect the klutzy sentence and diagnose what ails it (i.e., lacking knowledge of syntax), they lack the tools to make a sick sentence well.  "I know it isn't good and isn't clear," they tell me, "but I don't know how else to say it."  However, when I parse the sentence for them, using my knowledge of grammar (i.e., of how the language works), they often find the "better way of saying it" that they couldn't find before.  Sometimes they are surprised at how obvious the solution is once we have examined the sentence grammatically.

In other words, ignorance of grammar not only prevents students from writing effectively in the first place; it also deprives them of a skill that is essential for good writing – the ability to critically review and revise, to self-edit what they have written.  In my lifetime as a teacher of writing and as an editor, I have dealt with thousands of muddled sentences.  Well over half of the muddled sentences that I've edited or corrected have been muddled because they violated the conventional rules of grammar.

When I sent an e-mail to Ms. Rubin pointing out my objections to her position, she responded that she differentiates between usage and grammar and that by "traditional grammar" she meant sentence diagramming and "prescriptive grammar."  Sorry – I still don't get it.  Is the confusion of their and there, your and you're, its and it's a matter of usage or grammar?  Are we being too "prescriptive" when we insist that it's means "it is" and is not a possessive form of it, even though large numbers of people make this mistake?

Let's look first at the matter of "usage" versus "grammar."  Ms. Rubin's response to me suggests that she believes the two to be separate entities.  They are in some respects, and they aren't in others.  Usage refers to selection of the correct or appropriate word.  We can indeed have a sentence that is grammatically correct but unclear because of word choice.  However, an error in usage may constitute nothing more than the incorrect grammatical form of the word, such as the use of a possessive where a simple plural is needed, the use of an adverb where a pronoun is required (there for their), an inappropriate form of a verb, and so on.  I fail to see how we can teach usage independently of traditional grammar when the two overlap.

Ms. Rubin's opposition to sentence diagramming is understandable but misguided.  True, instruction in diagramming is arduous and probably counterproductive if it becomes an end in itself, if the instructor fails to stress the purpose of the exercise.  However, my generation came away from English classes with a better understanding of how words work together to convey thoughts by having developed some skill in visually representing how the syntax works.  Painful as diagramming was for many, the process planted, at some almost unconscious level, a sense of structure.  We may have missed some of the details and forgotten much of the terminology, but we learned that one does not make much sense by putting words together willy-nilly.

Educationists, I suspect, rejected diagramming for the same reason that, years ago, they rejected phonics.  They took something that worked and tossed it out because (a) it was not especially popular and (b) they didn't know how to teach it, having lost the skill to demonstrate how a seemingly mechanical exercise related to the actual practice of (in the case of phonics) spelling and reading and (in the case of diagramming) writing.  Eventually, after experimenting with "see and say" reading and spelling, educators realized that they were producing poor readers and spellers.  They aborted the experiment and returned to phonics.  They should consider doing the same regarding diagramming.  Whatever they are using in its place to teach sentence structure is not working.  It is such a miserable failure that many college freshmen don't even know the difference between a complete thought and a fragment, let alone how to construct a complete sentence.  When these students are expected to write mature sentences that express relationships between two or more thoughts, they are lost because they cannot grasp the structure.  The result is a string of words that is unintelligible and unreadable because it is devoid of any coherent structure.

To deny the role of traditional grammar in the writing of coherent prose is to deny the relationship between structure and sense in language.  That is absurd.  The agreed-upon rules (i.e., traditional grammar) evolved primarily for the purpose of making our written (and, to a lesser extent, oral) communication sensible – literally, to have it make sense.  Student writing is ineffective not because it violates "arbitrary traditional rules" enforced by "stuffy grammarians" who belong in a museum for extinct and now irrelevant pedagogues.  Student writing is ineffective because it doesn't make sense.  One of the main reasons it doesn't is that these students have not been taught grammar.