Wow…to me it’s quite unbelievable that GRAMMAR has been considered “the skunk in the garden” in the 21st-century writing classroom, and for decades before. But I want to argue for GRAMMAR. I want to demystify it, show what it really is, and explain how it fits into a skills-based approach to teaching/learning writing.
WHAT GRAMMAR REALLY IS!
As a ninth-grader, I sat in Ms. Edwards’ English class as a distracted 14-year-old (is there any other kind?) paying as much attention as I could muster to what we had to learn—what would be on the test—and what homework we’d have to do. English, if you didn’t count Gym, was my favorite class, by far. But Ms. Edwards, who was incredibly nice, generous, and caring, plunged us into English grammar—AND I COULD’T SWIM; I didn’t want to swim. Grammar seemed ridiculous.
Now all these years later, as a still-distracted 66-year-old, I teach grammar and even sentence diagramming to the students in my graduate Editing class. Is it to take revenge?
Clearly not.
I teach grammar to would-be professional writers and editors (who actually come to enjoy it) the way a shop teacher would teach the parts and workings of a car to a class of would-be auto mechanics. After all, how could the shop students become helpful auto mechanics if they didn’t understand how a car works and how to discuss how a car works?
So I define GRAMMAR simply as the special vocabulary that allows us to talk about how sentences work. I have, in fact, expanded the traditional boundaries of sentence GRAMMAR to include how paragraphs work, how sections of a document work, how documents are designed, how they’re organized, and even how content is generated.
I call my approach to teaching/learning writing A SKILLS-BASED APPROACH.
And it depends very much on knowing the special vocabulary that allows us to talk about how writing works at these various levels…a.k.a., GRAMMAR.
By the way, this approach is wildly popular with my graduate and undergraduate students, as well as with the many tens of thousands of adults I’ve worked with in the workplace over the past 35+ years in writing training classes.
Oddly, my skills-based approach is not (yet) so popular with the army of high-school, college, and grad-school teachers who tell me I ALREADY KNOW ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT TEACHING WRITING. (This may be, but ask students how practical and truly helpful the writing classes they took in school were, or ask employers how well their employees—especially newer employees—actually write, and you’ll soon see that the results of the business-as-usual high-school and university writing class are not spectacular, often not even okay.)
HOW grammar FITS INTO
A SKILLS-BASED APPROACH
TO WRITING!
To lay out my biased view of most current writing pedagogy, allow me to use an analogy. Let’s imagine that, instead of “writing,” one of the foundational skills for success in college and life thereafter were PLAYING GOLF. In that bizarro world, students from first grade through graduate school would have to take golfing lessons. Imagine that every golfing teacher handed out a set of golf clubs and a bunch of golf balls to the students and told them to go out to the golf course and knock the ball around until they got it into the distant hole. Rinse and repeat on all subsequent holes.
These golfing teachers “teach” like this because they believe that only practice can make perfect. And, of course, imitation is valuable, so these teachers have students watch golfing matches on TV.
But, wanting to be even more helpful, the teachers create a complex theory of teaching golf that is reflected in how they teach it. So they tell their students, IT’S ALL ABOUT THE HOLE. Every stroke you take should get the ball closer to and finally into the hole.
Furthermore, this GOLFING IS A PROCESS, they explain. So all students get the sage advice to PLAN/DRIVE/RESHOOT. Offering more help, teachers explain a kind of “genre” approach to golfing. Long holes are different from medium-length holes, which differ from short holes. And playing in a tournament is different from playing for fun. So they explain that students must MATCH YOUR GOLF TO THE REQUIRED GENRE.
Some well-meaning golfing teachers have their students watch the movie HAPPY GILMORE (with Adam Sandler): JUST HAVE FUN AND FREE-GOLF. Other teachers spend hours in a golfing lab having students PLAY COMPUTER GOLF to sharpen their skills.
Unfortunately, the golfing students need to be graded. So they are graded on “correctness”—how clean they keep their golfball, how well they keep their golf carts on the path, how conscientiously they fix ball marks on the green and replace the flags when they finish a hole. And, their strokes, too, will be counted.
Government Commissions are funded to study WHY STUDENTS CAN’T GOLF--why students don’t get the ball in the hole in fewer than 73 strokes per 18 holes. What’s wrong with THEM???
Then along comes a teacher who says, let’s teach them golf skills. Let’s teach them the special vocabulary needed to talk about how golfing works.
But this idea is shouted down. We already know all we need to know about teaching students to play golf. All of us have Ph.D.s in the subject. It’s been proven by RESEARCH that teaching students the special language used to talk about golfing—GOLF GRAMMAR—does not help them to play 18 holes in fewer than 73 strokes.
Nevertheless, this intrepid teacher continues the skills-based approach.
The teacher helps students choose the right golf shoes and clubs and even the right golfballs. Students learn what to call the different clubs and why one is used instead of another. The students learn how to use each of the different clubs. They are taught the technical aspects of the golf swing—how to grip the different clubs, how to address the ball, how to waggle, how to execute a proper back swing (for a fade or a draw), how to move the feet and legs and hips, how to execute the downswing and follow through, how to strategize for different kinds of golf holes. How to hit over a water hazard. How to hit the ball out of a sand trap. How to chip and putt and drive, etc.
Then the golfing students are taken out to the driving range to practice with technical supervision, using the special golf vocabulary they’ve learned, and, eventually, out on the golf course to play many rounds to perfect the skills they now have—and to have fun.
Okay, I admit, it’s a pretty corny analogy. But, far-fetched as it may seem, couldn’t “writing” be taught as a set of skills, using the special vocabulary for how writing works—GRAMMARs? Wouldn’t students be relieved to learn how writing works and how to play the game and how to talk about it?
GRAMMAR would be part of this skills-based approach. But, as I mentioned, it would be an all-inclusive set of grammars. So let’s see the broad outlines of such an approach.
Square One in a skills-based approach to teaching/learning WRITING would be what I call PRACTICAL WRITING—writing that gives real readers the information they want. (It is not WRITING TO ENTERTAIN. That’s a separate class. Let’s not mix the two.)
PRACTICAL WRITING brings together the writer (the information generator and presenter) and the reader (a REAL person who actually needs the information—not a teacher).
Skill #1 in practical writing is learning the foundational concept that PRACTICAL WRITING IS A CONVERSATION between a writer and a reader about the ISSUE in question.
Like a face-to-face conversation, a piece of writing (document)
is predicated on questions (from the reader) and answers (from the writer).
So students would first learn a radically reader-focused approach to “writing” (practical writing), whose goal is always to SERVE THE READER—answer the reader’s questions about the ISSUE in question.
Skill #2 in practical writing (whose goal is to serve the reader by generating USEFUL information and presenting it in the most READABLE way) is to learn the foundational concept that any document communicates through a collection of separate though inter-related systems—much as any body is a collection of separate, inter-related systems (nervous system, skeletal system, respiratory system, digestive system, etc.).
These systems that affect the usefulness and readability of any document are the Higher Order Concerns—call them HOCs—and the Lower Order Concerns—call them LOCs. Here are the HOCs & LOCs:
CONTENT
ORGANIZATION
DOCUMENT DESIGN
Paragraphs
Sentences
Word Choices
Mechanics
Each system has its own GRAMMAR—the special vocabulary used to talk about how that system works. For instance, the GRAMMAR of “Content” includes ISSUE (the reason the practical writer is writing and why the reader is reading). QUESTION FACTORING (the act of separating an ISSUE into all the appropriate reader questions about that ISSUE). METHODOLOGY (how answers to the reader’s questions are generated).
And there are smaller GRAMMARs within some of the larger ones, for instance, the grammar students can learn to generate useful content:
The GRAMMAR of EVALUATION would include developing evaluative criteria with which an actual condition (actual performance) could be measured—evaluated—to determine if there were any GAPS between what should be and what is. These GAPS could then be analyzed for their consequences to determine if the GAPS are serious enough to determine and enact corrective actions. And if the GAPS do have significant consequences, their causes could be ascertained so corrective actions could target the causes. By the way, students could learn about Ishikawa diagrams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram) for determining complex causes of complex GAPS. I think we call this part CRITICAL THINKING, don’t we?
Student writers should learn—from first grade through graduate school—that CONTENT is the most important aspect of any practical writing document! Generating useful content is where writing instruction should begin.
The GRAMMAR of ORGANIZATION has its several parts, and a special language that describes those parts. DOCUMENT DESIGN has its GRAMMAR—again, the special language that allows us to discuss this vital aspect of practical writing.
The LOCs also have their GRAMMARs. The GRAMMAR of how paragraphs work is vital for student writers. And soon we arrive at SENTENCE GRAMMAR (syntactical awareness). We learn to talk about how sentences work. OMG, we have to learn about VERBS (transitive, intransitive, and linking). We have to learn about NOUNS (their function as either subjects or objects—there are only three kinds of those: direct, indirect, ~ of a preposition). We get to learn about ADJECTIVES/ADVERBS—what their function is and how that function can be filled with an individual word, a phrase, or a clause. Is your head swimming yet? I hope not. GRAMMAR is pretty easy when taught functionally. And it does make better writers and editors.
Students of practical writing can be taught exotic concepts such as Parataxis and Hypotaxis (a.k.a., coordination and subordination). They can learn to write cumulative and periodic sentences. These are just clubs in a golf bag, shots one can make on a golf course—simple skills any writer can easily master and deploy!
JOIN ME IN BRINGING A SKILLS-BASED APPROACH
TO A WRITING CLASSROOM NEAR YOU!
Take action: contact me! I can help you develop a skills-based approach to writing whether you teach first grade, grad-school, or anything in between.
I’ve seen the results of such skills-based writing instruction. Students come to like writing, even love it, when they discover it’s mainly about giving people the information they need. Let writers be experts by writing about content they know and like for other students or people in the community who need that information.
Embrace GRAMMAR—all the HOCs & LOCs grammars that help us talk about how all the systems within writing work.
Students want to gain control. No longer is grammar pedantic—as it was for me in the 9th grade. It’s a pocketknife, a screwdriver, a hammer, a bolt, a nut, a screw, a nail! It’s writing as carpentry—YES THERE IS A GRAMMAR OF CARPENTRY!
Please contact me about this approach.
Check out my workplace writing textbook:
MASTERING WORKPLACE WRITING (https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Workplace-Writing-Second-critical-thinking/dp/0998498203).
See why DAN PINK—(4 of his books made the New York Times bestsellers' list. He hosted and co-executive produced the 2014 National Geographic Channel social science TV series Crowd Control. From 1995 to 1997, he was the chief speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore. ) wrote, “This comprehensive volume is the only writing handbook a student will need.”
See why SUSAN KLEIMANN—(Chairwoman, Center for Plain Language) wrote, “The HOCs & LOCs approach builds the foundation of good thinking—content, organization, and then presentation…This book is a must for classroom and the workplace. Brilliant!”
See why DR. GINNY REDISH—(author of Letting Go the Words—Writing Web Content that Works) wrote, “Students working with this book will be well prepared for their business careers.”