Anyone familiar with “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,…” must be aware of how interesting—and how important—an awareness of the principles of grammar, usage and punctuation can be. And anyone who reflects for a moment or two on a phrase such as “large barge inspector” can surely sense that the study of grammar, usage, and punctuation can be fun as well as interesting.
For publishers with a strong line of course texts in this area, though, it has in recent years been a deflating experience to try to talk of grammar and of books about grammar with writing instructors in North American universities . Using course texts as part of the teaching experience in first-year writing courses has long been going out of favor, but until a decade or so ago, even those instructors who spent little time teaching from textbooks would typically assign a reference guide to grammar and usage for their students.
Not in recent years.
In some departments in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic years, there were more than 50 instructors teaching the department’s introductory writing class, with no more than one or two of them assigning any book on writing. If you asked them specifically about grammar and usage, and whether they might at least consider assigning a reference guide, you were likely to hear some variant of these four standard answers:
No, we don’t teach the minutiae in this department; what we focus on is the big picture—and the process of writing.
No, we don’t teach that type of thing; they should have learned all that in high school.
No, I wouldn’t assign a book like that. If students need a resource of that sort, I send them online to one of the free sites—Purdue Owl, usually.*
No, we don’t teach grammar here. Research has shown that trying to teach grammar to students is likely to actually harm their writing.
That is indeed what the research showed in the 1960s—or seemed to show. Teaching writing in the 1950s had been widely felt to involve far too many robotic grammar drills that were hated by students and that seemed to be doing little to improve their writing. When the National Council of Teachers of English appointed a committee to investigate the practice of teaching composition in the US, the committee (headed by Richard Braddock) reached a conclusion that it asserted could “be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible, or because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing.”
This conclusion of Braddock et al.’s 1963
Report into Research in Written Composition was based largely on a University of London doctoral dissertation from the previous year, in which R.J. Harris had studied the grammar performance of a selection of 12-14 year-old children in five London secondary schools. Though Braddock et al. did not think the Harris study was without its flaws, they nevertheless endorsed its conclusions. Indeed, as Martha Kolin notes (in a 1996 article, “Rhetorical Grammar: A Modification Lesson”), they went even further than had Harris. Where Harris had concluded that it seemed “safe to infer that the study of English grammatical terminology had a negligible or even a relatively harmful effect upon the correctness of children's writing in the early part of the five Secondary Schools,” the Braddock report broadened “upon the correctness of children’s writing” to “on the improvement of writing.”** (They also, it may be observed, broadened Harris’s “the study of English grammatical terminology” to “the teaching of formal grammar.”)
Influential though the Braddock Report was, it’s likely that only a minority of writing instructors today are familiar with it. Many more are likely familiar with Patrick Harwell’s oft-anthologized article arguing against traditional classroom grammar instruction, “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar” (
College English, 1985).*** And more still are likely aware of Peter Elbow’s
Writing with Power (1981, 2/e 1998) which exerted an enormous influence on late twentieth and early twenty-first teachers of writing. Famously, Elbow had this to say about grammar:
Learning grammar is a formidable task that takes crucial energy away from working on your writing, and worse yet, the process of learning grammar interferes with writing; it heightens your preoccupation with mistakes as you write out each word and phrase, and makes it almost impossible to achieve that undistracted attention to your thoughts and experiences as you write that is crucial for strong writing (and sanity). For most people, nothing helps their writing so much as learning to ignore grammar as they write.
That passage is often quoted, both by supporters and opponents of downgrading or eliminating the teaching of grammar in writing classes. Interestingly, it’s sometimes quoted with the last three words omitted (see, for example, Edward C. Hanganu’s 2015 article, “Teaching Grammar in College”). But those last three words are of vital importance; Elbow never in fact suggested that writers should ignore grammar or that the details of grammar were mere “minutiae.”
Elbow, who focused on the writing process (recommending an initial freewriting stage, followed by several stages of revision), held the entirely reasonable view that one should not be concerned with issues such as how to make one’s writing grammatical when one is working on a first draft; that’s when freewriting is appropriate. In Elbow’s view, even the second and third drafts are not normally good times to focus on the mechanics of grammar, usage, and punctuation. Grammar, he felt, should be focused on only at the very final stage of revision. But that did not mean that he thought it unimportant. On the contrary, he wrote at some length on “the desirability of learning grammar if you don’t know it,” devoting a full chapter of
Writing with Power to the topic, and recommending that individuals do their best to acquire a good knowledge of grammar:
Happily, it’s not hard to find good instruction in grammar. There are lots of courses for people of all ages and lots of … textbooks from which you can learn it yourself in six months of diligent slogging. … But a class is probably the best method for ensuring you keep going. If you take a class, try to shop around to see if you can find a teacher who suits you. …
For some unknown reason, Elbow seems to seem to assume that whatever grammar classes one might seek out will be outside the academy. He seems to assume too that, since learning grammar may involve “diligent slogging,” in the short term one is likely to have to fall back on other methods of revising so as to make one what writes grammatical:
[In the short term] I know of no other way than to get the help of a proofreader or two for any piece of writing that you want taken seriously. It is best, of course, if you can find someone who is good at finding mistakes. But if none of your close friends has that skill, you can use acquaintances or even find a competent person you don’t know.
There are all sorts of practical problems with applying Elbow’s approach universally—not the least of which is the matter of how undergraduate students might go about finding “someone who is good at finding mistakes” in grammar, when all their friends and classmates are likely to be equally in the dark. (Issues of class and of inequlaity are of course also relevant here; if it might not always be easy even for students from privileged backgrounds at Ivy League institutions to get reliable grammar advice from their friends, it is sure to be far more difficult for students from impovershed backgrounds at inner-city community colleges to do so.) It seems to me to be problematic too that Elbow appears to regard grammar as something entirely unconnected from the structure of ideas in a piece of writing, rather than something that can often be integral to the structuring of ideas into sentences. But the key point here is that even the writing expert who is often thought to be the most influential opponent of teaching grammar was very much of the view that anyone who wants their writing to be taken seriously should learn the conventions of grammar, usage, and punctuation.
For some time in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the majority of studies seemed to support Harris’s findings. But eventually more and more scholars began to draw attention to the flaws in these studies (see, for example, D. Tomlinson’s 1994 article, “Errors in the research into the effectiveness of grammar teaching,”
English in Education, 28). And more and more research began to appear concluding that various forms of grammar instruction could in fact have many benefits: that sentence combining could improve students’ writing (see, for example, S. Graham and D. Perin, “A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students,”
Journal of Educational Psychology, 99 [2007]); that students could benefit from direct and explicit instruction in grammar (as versus the “deductive” or “implicit” approach, according to which students are introduced to grammar without any explicit instruction in its terms or its principles) (see, for example, Leslie Ann Rogers and Steve Graham, “A Meta-Analysis of Single Subject Design Writing Intervention Research,”
Journal of Educational Psychology [2008], C. Benitez-Correa et al., “A Comparison between Deductive and Inductive Approaches for Teaching EFL Grammar to High School Students,”
International Journal of Instruction, 12 [1], [2019], and Pouya Vakili,
“Give Me the Rules, I’ll Understand Grammar Better”: Exploring the Effectiveness of Usage-Based Grammar Approach through Explicit Instruction of Adverbials [doctoral thesis] [2022]); that there are many ways to teach grammar effectively without returning to a 1950s-style classroom of repetitive drilling;**** and that, overall, teaching grammar has a positive effect on students’ writing (see, for example, Susan Jones et al., “Grammar for Writing? An Investigation of the Effects of Contextualised Grammar Teaching on Students’ Writing,”
Reading and Writing, 26 [2013])***** As Jimmy H.M. van Rijt and his colleagues conclude regarding the overall trend,
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century there has been a renewed interest in grammar teaching in L1 classrooms, both in research and in policy making (Hudson and Walmsley, 2005, Locke, 2010). This interest has become even more apparent in recent years, since the well-rehearsed argument emerging in the 1970s that grammar education has no impact on literacy development is starting to crumble (e.g., Andrews, 2005, Elley et al., 1975, Graham and Perin, 2007). While traditional parsing exercises generally fail to improve students’ writing, there is a growing body of empirical evidence indicating positive effects of contextualized grammar teaching on writing development (e.g., Fearn and Farnan, 2007, Fontich, 2016, Jones et al., 2013, Myhill et al., 2018, Myhill et al., 2012, Watson and Newman, 2017). (“When students tackle grammatical problems: Exploring linguistic reasoning with linguistic metaconcepts in L1 grammar education,” Linguistics and Education 52 [2019])
To be sure, the ground is still contested; not all studies agree, and in every large Rhetoric and Writing Studies Department you can find plenty of instructors who still maintain that “the research” shows that grammar instruction actually harms students’ writing. On one point at least, though, there seems to be no disagreement; no one seems to take issue with the suggestion that learning about the ways in which English is structured improves students’ analytic abilities. As Pouya Vakili and Reda Mohammed write in the conclusion of their paper on the topic,
Students can learn and benefit generally from grammar instruction, even if, for no other reason, it helps to build their scientific knowledge of the world and analytic skills…. In general, explicit grammar instruction helps students have a better understanding of syntax and grammar, … have a better perception of the descriptive quality of language …, develop critical thinking about grammar, become able to analyze sentences at the morphosyntactic level, and improve their linguistic performance. (“‘Grammar Scares Me’: An Exploration of American Students’ Perceptions of Grammar Learning,” International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 124 [2020])
In a world in which English instructors at colleges and universities of all sorts are increasingly asked to teach critical thinking skills as well as writing skills, surely it is no bad thing to provide at least modest amounts of explicit grammar instruction.
As we approach the mid-point of the twenty-first century’s third decade, there are more and more signs that the tide has begun ever so slowly to turn. Thankfully, there is no sign of a return to 1950s-style mindless drilling. But there does seem to be some level of increased interest in how teaching grammar can be helpful. Earlier this year, we at Broadview Press conducted extensive research into the viability of three possible “spin-off” books that might be put together from material included in
The Broadview Guide to Writing (a large handbook covering topics such as writing process, writing style, and academic citation as well as grammar and usage). We were surprised to find that, of the three possible spin-offs that had been suggested, the one that by some distance generated the most interest was the idea of publishing as a stand-alone volume the sections of the book that deal with grammar, usage, and punctuation. A couple of months from now we will publish
The Broadview Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation (a concise text that will also offer access to a wide range of online exercises, many using real-world examples, and many with interactive “explain each answer” features). I’m going to be very interested to see how it’s received.
The larger
Broadview Guide has been described by
They Say / I Say authors Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein as “smart, helpful, and even fun to read,” and certainly our goal (in this “spin-off” grammar and usage book as much as in the larger
Guide) is to demonstrate that matters of grammar and usage can be highly interesting and highly entertaining as well as extremely useful. By way of illustration, let me return in closing to the large barge inspector; here’s the book’s entry on “ambiguity”:
ambiguity: Two broad categories of English language ambiguity are semantic ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity (also known as structural ambiguity). Semantic ambiguity occurs as a result of a word or words having two or more possible meanings. Since the word light has two unrelated meanings, a light box can refer either to a box that is not heavy or to a box with a sheet of glass on one side through which light shines. In the newspaper headline “Red tape holds up new bridge,” there are two sources of semantic ambiguity; To hold up something can mean either to keep it off the ground or to delay it, and the expression red tape has both a literal and an idiomatic meaning.
Syntactic ambiguity is a matter of grammar—of the way in which words are arranged in a sentence, and of how they are interpreted grammatically. One circumstance in which syntactical ambiguity can arise is when there is uncertainty as to whether or not a compound noun is being used. Someone who is employed to perform safety inspections of large barges might be described as a “large barge inspector”—but if his job title is barge inspector (a compound noun), then the word large in “large barge inspector” could reasonably be taken to refer to the size of the inspector rather than of the barges. Is a plastic fruit bowl necessarily made of plastic? Or can it be a bowl of any sort that happens to hold pieces of plastic fruit?
Within the broad categories there may be ambiguities of several types. For further discussions of ambiguity in these pages—sorry, that should be “for further discussions in these pages of ambiguity”—see the entries on dangling constructions, on pronouns, and on word order problems, as well as the entries below for words such as flammable.
*As I’ve written elsewhere (“The Cost of Free,” http://donlepan.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-cost-of-free.html), most of these free sites lend support to the adage “you get what you pay for.” Even Purdue Owl—which does seem to be the best of them—includes few complex or real-world examples, is cluttered with advertisements, and in some sections is riddled with inaccuracies and outright errors. It’s hard to blame instructors for taking this route; for many years there was at many universities tremendous pressure on instructors to choose low-cost or no-cost learning materials, regardless of quality. The past two or three years, though, have seen great growth in “inclusive access” systems, whereby students pay a modest surcharge per course to cover the cost of learning materials; where “inclusive access” has been adopted, there’s no longer pressure on instructors to rely on learning materials that are available at no cost, whatever their quality.
** It’s perhaps worth noting here that the Braddock Report’s language here leaves something to be desired where grammar and usage are concerned. The report draws its conclusion as to the effect that “the teaching of formal grammar” has on “the improvement of writing,” when what the authors surely mean to refer to is the effect that it has on students’ writing itself—or, if one feels that the concept of improvement must in some way be introduced explicitly, on the degree to which writing does or does not improve.
*** For a discussion of the influence of Hartwell’s article, see Becky Caouette, “On the College Front: Patrick Hartwell's ‘Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar’ and the Composition of Anthology,” Language Arts Journal of Michigan 27 [2012]. Caouette suggests that Hartwell’s may be “a dated argument that we nevertheless continue to promulgate.”
**** Much of the focus here has been on so-called “contextual teaching” of grammar, according to the principles of which grammar is taught “in context,” through discussion of grammatical points in students’ reading, and in students’ own writing, rather than as “a formal system” or “in isolation,” through exercises that too often do not replicate the structures of real-world writing. Constance Weaver, who argued persuasively in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century for the contextualized teaching of grammar (see Teaching Grammar in Context (1996), and “The Great Debate (Again): Teaching Grammar and Usage,” The English Journal, 85 [1996]), suggested that not all grammatical concepts should be given equal weight, and that it is far more important for students to grasp concepts such as subject-verb agreement and comma splices than it is for them to grasp some other concepts. She pointed to ways in which looking at real-world examples of such matters can be of great benefit to the student. But it remains not entirely clear lear how, without at least some instruction in grammar as a formal system, students will be able to “learn to punctuate sentences correctly and effectively (according to accepted conventions), judiciously violating the rules on occasion, for rhetorical effect,” as Weaver recommends.
Nor is it clear why instructors can't sensibly aim to combine a certain amount of teaching the formal systems of grammar with contextual teaching of points of grammar as they discuss various readings (or the students's own writing).
***** Though a very great many articles have been written on “the grammar wars,” there are surprisingly few rigorous studies involving first-language (“L1” in the literature) learners or involving learners at the post-secondary level, and very few indeed that try to measure the effect of teaching grammar on students’ writing performance. The 2013 study by Jones et al. is a welcome exception. Here is their summing up: “The role of grammar instruction in the teaching of writing is contested in most Anglophone countries, with several robust meta-analyses finding no evidence of any beneficial effect. However, existing research is limited in that it only considers isolated grammar instruction and offers no theorization of an instructional relationship between grammar and writing. This study, drawing on a theorized understanding of grammar as a meaning-making resource for writing development, set out to investigate the impact of contextualized grammar instruction on students’ writing performance. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach, with a randomized controlled trial and a complementary qualitative study. The statistical analyses indicate a positive effect on writing performance for the intervention group (e = 0.21; p < 0.001); but the study also indicates that the intervention impact differentially on different sub-groups, benefiting able writers more than weaker writers. The study is significant in being the first to supply rigorous, theorized evidence for the potential benefits of teaching grammar to support development in writing.”
