grammar grammar grammar

After all of our grammar lessons for the week, and our discussion on Wednesday, I do feel that grammar seems to be something people latch on to and really judge your writing on. Joseph M. Williams seems to touch on this in his article. He talks about the different ways of reading a paper, one for content and one for typographical errors. As he points out you have two different frames of mind when you are looking for two very different things in a paper. I want to look for content in my students’ papers. I want my comments to be about the good or not so good directions they take their papers, not about the dangling modifiers they messed up on.
It’s funny, as Williams points out, that there seems to be one grammar rule we latch onto and drill people for. Mine is commas and coordinating conjunctions. The minute I see a FANBOY in a paper I read the sentence again to see if a comma is needed or not. As Williams points out, however, we each have our own little grammar nitch we use so you may have three people read a paper and find all different grammar mistakes they feel are the most important or take away from the paper itself. This grammar leach we all seem to choose comes along with Williams point that the errors begin on the page but are the error of a person who learned a grammar rule from a grammar handbook which was written by another human and was thus taught to the student by yet another person. With human involvement comes human error as Williams points out. No grammar handbook is going to be free of its own grammar errors, so why do we expect our students to be so in tune with grammar usage?

There are set grammar rules, yet they all seem to have modifications as Adam and I pointed out in class about the wonderful world that was “modified” Chicago style we used a few weeks ago when editing the Chaucer Review. Or the fact that, as my friend Matt was notorious for saying when I edited his papers “That’s a stylistic choice.” If we can modify grammar rules then isn’t everything really a stylistic choice? Why can some rules be modified and others can’t? I just used a contraction. Would Sohomjit’s teacher be crying right now? Let’s just say I’ve thoroughly contradicted and confused myself with grammar at the moment, so to even think I could address any of this to my students is comical to me.