In answer to Alyssa’s “Grammar Nazis” posting:

Alyssa, you asked for some of our ideas on “grammatical errors that affect clarity.” I’d like first to quickly respond to your question about “who else in the population [besides English majors] sees these errors like we do?” In 2008, I researched and wrote a recommendation report to add a writing component to a YWCA in Salem, Oregon, and found evidence that grammatical errors matter a lot in business and academia. I’ll bring in a few copies of pertinent excerpts for anyone who’s interested. That being said, I like what you said about grading for “content and development” and not for grammatical errors.

Preparing Students for Grammar

I agree that fixing their errors for them doesn’t help students avoid future errors. Furthermore, exercises in skill-and-drill and error-hunting in isolated sentences don’t transfer over to writing. So I’m always trying to find ways to make grammar easier to learn, more interesting, and less stifling and more supportive of student creativity. I use the general guidelines (we’ve touched on some in class) to get tutees invested in their writing task and eventually in grammar:

• Help them pinpoint a topic they like. If assigned a topic they don’t like, encourage them to find some aspect of the assigned topic they really want to write about.
• Encourage them to do lots of prewriting and not to worry about grammar when they do it.
• For ESL students who are stuck, urge them to use their first language or a mixture of their first language and English to get their ideas on paper.
• Have students say or read their sentences out loud to someone (like me) for immediate feedback. When we agree that they’ve hit on a good sentence, have them write it down.
• Work with students on one grammar issue at a time; deeper learning of a single issue is better than a shotgun approach.

Teaching Grammar as Teaching Choices

I like the idea of a choices model over a deficiency model, with teachers/tutors acting as a guide rather than a grammar cop. I think this model ultimately helps students write better and can fit comfortably into most tutoring and teaching situations. These are the first grammatical areas I focus on with developing writers because they pave the way for the more creative lessons of rhetorical grammar, or stylistics. You’re probably familiar with these ideas:

1.      Sentence boundaries. Recognizing sentence boundaries helps clear up many errors, including unintended fragments, run-ons, and comma splices. It’s done by identifying subjects and predicates—

a.       using a tag question to mark the right boundary

b.      using a yes/no question to mark the left boundary

Recognizing sentence boundaries also allows more advanced writers to use English’s natural end-weight rhetorically to control given and new information and thereby create more cohesive paragraphs. It can help them combine sentences to make denser writing. Furthermore, it helps writers focus the reader’s attention where they want it in the sentence. The idea is helping the writer see choices—to be able to say, for instance,

Why don’t you read this sentence aloud and tell me where the reader’s attention is drawn to? Okay. Is that the most important part of the sentence you want readers to remember, or is there something else you’d like them to remember?

What would happen if you were to move this clause to the front of the sentence? Where does that focus the reader’s attention? Now, for your purposes, which way do you like better?

Can you combine these noun phrases to make this sentence denser, richer? Does this choice sacrifice reading ease? Is it worth the extra work by the reader to do that?

How can you rearrange these sentences to make the paragraph hang together better?

This may be a (pipe) dream for many students at their current writing level. For some students, getting information down on paper, organizing their thoughts, and avoiding stigmatizing errors is the first goal. But dreams can be good if they lead to innovative ways of teaching, leading students step-by-step to the next level of their writing.

More specific explanations of how to teach sentence boundaries can be found at http://www.sargent.nelson.com/bones.html (“Bare Bones Writer’s Grammar”).

2.      Word classes. Recognizing word classes—minimally, how to identify nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, determiners, and conjunctions of all types—helps students know how they function in sentences and phrases. For example: Determiners and adjectives precede nouns or follow copular-be and join it to a noun, an adjective, or a prepositional phrase. Prepositions are always followed by a noun or noun phrase. Once writers start noticing these types of patterns, they can begin to control them. And when they can control them, they are free to concentrate on other things in their writing (like content and stylistics).

3.      Cognates. Recognizing cognates helps ESL student avoid typical writing errors. When they use the wrong word class, you can help them fill in the columns of a word class chart. Eventually they can do this for themselves. Knowing cognates gives them more control over their writing.

Word Classes
Nouns	Verbs	Adjectives	Adverbs
education educator	educate	educated
beauty	beautify	beautiful	beautifully

4.      Vocabulary. A large vocabulary is the number one predictor of academic success, and reading is the best way to expand vocabulary, so I encourage extensive pleasure reading and vocabulary study. I also give students sample index cards with spots for the word, its meaning(s), pronunciation markings, collocations, and use in a sentence.

5.      Phrasal verbs, collocations, and pesky prepositions. For ESL learners, phrasal verbs and collocations are a problem. I think lists are one way to deal with this. I give them lists of the most common ones, and they can add to the lists as they come across new words and phrases.

6.      Proofreading and editing checklists. The idea is to help all students become independent writers. This means being their becoming aware and checking for their own typical errors. By helping students create checklists, you put them in charge of finding and correcting their own errors. A list can have items as simple as subject-verb agreement and comma splices, to dangling participles and parallelism errors, to more high-level issues like nominalization and given-new arrangement (paragraph cohesion).

Stylistics: Notice, Name, Apply

Amy Benjamin (see below), who writes for high school teachers, recommends Notice, Name, Apply, which she borrowed from Katie Wood Ray’s Wondrous Words, written for elementary school teachers. In combination with grammatical terminology, it helps students “harvest what they find” from literature. To do this, they notice what they see, they name it, and they apply it to their own writing.

More on Grammar Instruction

I enjoyed reading the following two NCTE publications that show how grammar can be creatively incorporated into the classroom using a choice model rather than a deficiency model:

Benjamin, Amy and Oliva, Tom. Engaging Grammar: Practical Advice for Real Classrooms. NCTE, Urbana, 2007.

Haussamen, Brock, Kolln, Martha, and Wheeler, Rebecca. Grammar Alive! A Guide for Teachers. NCTE, Urbana, 2003.

Here are four more books on rhetorical grammar:

Burch, C. Beth. A Writer’s Grammar. Pearson Education, Inc., New York, 2003.

Hoffman, Gary and Glynis. Adios, Strunk and White: A Handbook for the New Academic Essay. Birmingham Press/Verve Press, Huntington Beach, 2011. [minimal grammar instruction; lots of innovative writing examples]

Kolln, Martha and Gray, Loretta. Rhetorical Grammar. Pearson Education, Inc., New York, 2013.

Longknife, Ann and Sullivan K. D., The Art of Styling Sentences: 20 Patterns for Success, Barron’s, Happauge, New York, 2002.

There’s an interesting article on the rise and fall (and rise again!) of modern rhetoric in a recent edition of NCTE’s College English. Have you seen it?

Lockhart, Tara. “Emerging voices: Shifting Rhetorics of Style.” College English 75:1 (September 2012): 16-41.

I would love to hear other ideas on teaching grammar and stylistics and what’s possible and what isn’t. What have been some of your experiences?