Oh grammar. The horrible little word that has plagued me since I declared myself as an English major. It is funny that two of the three articles discussed the common response when you tell someone you are an English major or an English teacher: “Well, I better watch my grammar” because in my undergraduate grammar class my teacher asked one day what was the response we were so tired of hearing when we told people we were English majors, and everyone unanimously responded “Well, I better watch my grammar.” It comes as this ingrained idea that because you are an English major or an English teacher that you are a “grammar granny.”
I was required to take both a linguistics course and a grammar course in my undergraduate studies. I actually found the linguistics course to be more helpful than the grammar course. The same teacher taught both courses, and on the first day of the grammar course she made it clear that although we probably were expecting the course to help us become better writers that was not the main focus of the course. She told us 85% of the class would do absolutely nothing to help improve our writing; it was purely English grammar and very mathematical type English rules and formulas. The other 15% of the course was supposed to help our writing, but to be honest I found the other 85% to be frustrating and not the best use of a grammar class. I have learned that the best way to approach grammar is not to teach repetitive rules out of context of an actual working piece and that seems to be the approach these articles take. I liked Michael Williamson’s article the best of the three because he not only discussed how to and not to teach college writing, but he showed the mentality of many different students. He pointed out that stronger writers describe writing as a form of communication and self expression where weaker writers describe the use of grammar, grammar rules, and structure. I guess it is our job as teachers to help our students see the way stronger writers view writing and try to move them away from the way weaker writers view writing.
It was funny to me because as I was reading through Williamson discussed the common Western Pennsylvania sentence “That house needs painted” and, I hate to admit, being from Western Pennsylvania, I had to read on to see what was wrong with this sentence. I guess it just goes to show yes we are English teachers, English majors, but our grammar is not perfect, and we should not expect our students to be perfect either. We should convey to them they are not taking a grammar class but an English class where, hopefully, they see the class as the stronger writers did and not as the weaker writers did.
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I'm going to post my post under Jenn's post because most of what I have to say is directly related to Jenn's post.
Post.
Most of my post will center around two anecdotes of grammarness. The first comes from a friend who lives in Pittsburgh and is a potter. He was talking with one of his potter friends in the art building where they both work, and someone who was acquainted with the friend of my friend (got all that?) came in and said "So, yinz think yer all potters anat." Jenn will probably understand this phrase, but I had to have it translated for me, as did my friend. This is just one of the thousands of examples I'm sure we could all recite of local dialects using grammar that is blatantly opposed to the mainstream. Is this a good thing? To some extent it is, but don't we have to learn to communicate in more mainstream discourses, and isn't that what English teachers are supposed to teach? Granted, they shouldn't spend all their time on grammar. I don't think anybody who's done any substantive reading on the subject would argue that point. But accepting discourses indiscriminately rather than encouraging some normalization into a somewhat more standardized discourse seems problematic at best. Was that too wordy? I hope it made some degree of sense.
Here's my second anecdote (did you remember that I said it'd be two-parted? Who's still paying attention?). I was talking to a few people at a party, one of whom was of Mexican-American heritage. I had recently offended her with some disparaging remarks about the Mexican national soccer team compared to the American (a startlingly touchy subject for Mexican-Americans, I discovered) (bear with me, it's relevant). A moment later, I said to one of my friends, in a reference to a Family Guy line, "You're doing good." I said it with quite a good deal of sarcasm (surprising, right?), but my Mexican-American acquaintance ("friend" would probably be a bit of a stretch after this conversation), knowing that I was an English major, immediately seized upon the opportunity to point out my grammatical indiscretion.
My point (a circuitous one...surprising, right?) again goes back to our position as English teachers and the way it changes the way we converse with people and the sense of our responsibilities. On the one hand it's kind of annoying, but on the other I think there's something to be said for encouraging people into a slightly more normalized discourse that will work for everyone. A galactic basic, if you will.
I'm pretty sure that was a Star Wars reference. That's as good a sign as any that it's time to shut up and go watch election coverage. Ben out.
There seems to be a lively discussion going on in this post, so I think I'll just join in instead of coming up with a new thread. It is amusing that the most frequent assumption made about English students should be that they fiddle with grammar. I can recall countless such anecdotes when I, the sole student of 'English' (a curiously bald statement that, since most of them have varied degrees of proficiency in ‘English’. I don’t understand why I am not at least referred to as a student of English literature) in my extended family (I will not scare you with numbers, or expound on how extended it is, or can get, on occasions), was called upon to be the final arbiter in matters grammatical. Having a colonial hangover, of course, complicates matters. Let's not get into that, it's 1.05 in the night already and I do want to get some sleep.
First off, some declarations. As a student of 'English' ( I vehemently oppose this label, I am a student of what maybe called, for lack of a better term, English Studies), do I feel irritated when a grammatical error is committed in my presence and proceed to correct it posthaste? Not always. I do it with my twin, because it annoys him immensely. Otherwise, I just inwardly wince, and keep shut. And the problem seldom arose with extended family because English is not the preferred language of communication. However, some of my family shares this annoying tendency of referring to me when in doubt about anything remotely 'English'. I would be called upon to proofread horrible articles (with regards to content, form, everything); treated as a portable human dictionary at the dinner table;or, on really dire occasions, be asked to express opinion on how reprehensible it was that the students nowadays have such an imperfect understanding of the paramount importance of the past participle and the gerund. It heartens me a little to think that my American counterparts thousands of kms. away faced similar predicaments.
So, yes, when Jenn agrees with Williamson et al, I am inclined to agree with her. I would much rather be asked what exact purpose a study of autobiographies by women serve (make sure you have the time to hear my rant about how the ‘word of the father’ has repressed “l’écriture feminine” and how it needs to be recovered from the palimpsests of negotiated meanings) than the features of independent clauses. And yes, as Ben suggests, a galactic basic would be nice, but also unduly restrictive in a world where, as Margaret Atwood suggests (in her Foreword to the Wordsworth Companion to English Literature), “Englishes” not “English” is spoken (and written), and a speaker of one ‘English’ can generally make “an educated guess at understanding” the other “Englishes”. So here is my educated guess, or translation, if you will, of what the sentence quoted by Ben means—“So, you guys think that you are all potters and all that?” That, I think, was easier to get than the Star Wars reference, actually (imagine a smiley here since I don’t think a blog provides you with one).
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