The Grammar Gestapo vs. The Antinomians

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Grammar rules are banana peels on the sidewalk of life.”—Anonymous

“Grammar is the art of putting language in its place on or off the sidewalk.”—Anonymous

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—3/28/11—For over a thousand years, Old, Middle, and Modern English flourished without a grammar book to their names. King Alfred, Chaucer, and Shakespeare relied solely on their exquisitely tuned ears because Fowler, Strunk, White, and their kin had not yet been born.

In the 15th century, when grammarians were gaining a beachhead in Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund declared, “I am the Roman Emperor, and I am above grammar.”

With little Latin and less Greek, Sigismund was from the same school (word used loosely) as George W. Bush, who blithely assumed that imprecision in language carried few if any consequences.

A Short Introduction to English Grammar, the first of its kind, was published in 1762 by Bishop Robert Lowth, but the powdered-wig rules he cobbled were more relevant to Latin than English. Is it any wonder then that grammar reminds many of a forbidding classical façade? To satirize the idea in 1802 that language etiquette is the lace doily on a rococo couch, pretty but inessential, Timothy Dexter added a page of commas to his unpunctuated autobiography with instructions that readers could “peper and solt them as they plese[.]”

Freelance grammarian Dexter reminds me of the freshman who said she placed a comma in a text when she needed to breathe. She lectured me after I failed one of her essays for a score of comma splices and fragments saying, “If you get hung up on whether it’s ‘the yolk is white’ or ‘the yolk are white,’ you’re likely to overlook the fact that the yolk is yellow.” I accused her of being a loose cannon from the Breathitarian Armory, but her point was well taken: it is the content, not the comma, that we read for.

In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century(1999), Neil Postman reminds readers that grammar comprised a third of the medieval Trivium, and that curricular prominence has carried over to the present. Among logic and rhetoric, grammar, he argues, is the “least potent, the least able to help students do what we call critical thinking . . . . Indeed,” he says, “it is difficult to know why grammar, as it is presently taught, is included in the curriculum at all.”

That subordinate clause “as it is presently taught” presents a stumbling block for many teachers of writing because Postman cannot know how thousands of us teach the subject. He apparently thinks it is taught prescriptively by completing exercises in a workbook without any extended reading or writing involved. However, judging from the teachers I’ve interviewed, none at the college level uses this Gradgrindian method exclusively.

Moreover, Postman’s point about the relative “impotence” of grammar is overstated. My experience has demonstrated that proofreading for grammar errors after the first or second draft helps to insure that the sentences follow logically and are phrased to make the argument persuasive. In other words, grammar is a partner of logic and rhetoric, not extraneous. Take any clause, such as “all men are created equal” in “The Gettysburg Address,” and forge a subject-verb disagreement on top of a misspelling. Now imagine how quickly that logical and rhetorical masterpiece would have dropped from our national memory if Lincoln had written, “All mens is equal.”

The ideal, as I view it from behind the lectern, is for students to read vast quantities of great literature, discuss it, write about it, and absorb the grammar by osmosis. Alas, that rarely happens. To be sure, there are readers such as Joseph Conrad who grow up on Polish, and then “pick up” English like a penny in the parking lot by reading Shakespeare and Dickens.

Such student readers are as rare as black tulips.

In my own case, I gathered rudiments of grammar reading The Hardy Boys series, but learned even more in formal terms by diagramming sentences and completing work sheets in high school. I never had a grammar course per se in college, but I did correct the mistakes my professors had marked on my papers and rewrote the corrected sentences as directed.

The place I really learned my subject was the classroom in which I had to teach it. The week before entering that class was the first time I’d read a grammar the way I’d been taught to read a poem by the New Critics: with a dictionary by my side and an eye to tracking the antecedent of every pronoun. I was also terrified some kid from a fancy prep school was going to ask me why I had not used a possessive before a gerund. So it behooved me to learn what gerunds were, and reading Faulkner was no help in that regard. Grammar gave me the technical language I could use to help a student pinpoint a problem. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of, “That doesn’t sound right,” you know it’s not much help.

Faced with widespread indifference, I began to wonder how best to motivate undergraduates to learn the ground rules of language.

One way I discovered, and it’s only one, involves bringing to class language issues that have immediate consequences. An example I used in January of 2010 involved Sen. Harry Reid’s innocent use of the word “Negro.” Despite his long advocacy of civil rights, many of his opponents called for Reid’s resignation, even when the latest US Census form listed “Negro” as a racial category that African Americans might choose to identify themselves. If nothing else, the class discussion emphasized that word choice often has seismic repercussions in the public arena. I understood that best when a friend with 18 years of “superior” academic service lost her job for using one ill-considered word.

Another of my classroom examples is the now famous sentence Sarah Palin used in her last speech as Alaska’s governor in 2009: “It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.” After writing Palin’s sentence on the board, I asked the students to paraphrase it. As we attempted to read the governor’s mind (“Are there moose in those woods?” one young man wanted to know), many, I think, understood why writing or speech of such ludicrous ineptitude may become a lightning rod.

Another student typed Palin’s sentence onto his laptop but, though black smoke issued from the vent, Microsoft did not issue a single green or red squiggle. The day has not arrived when we can rely on a grammar checker app.

To detractors like Thoreau (“Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.”), a red-penciled grammar error is the equivalent of denying a soldier his weekend pass based on a loose thread: a cheap way of asserting authority. But “to disparage [grammar] as empty formalism,” as Sidney Harris wrote, is as foolish as, “venerating it as a sign of superiority.” We’ve all found ourselves in disagreements that originated with a misunderstanding of something we said or wrote. Grammar in the broad sense of good communication would have prevented many of those unpleasantries. Who except the creative writer thinks ambiguity is “richness”? The language ethic for most writers (and who isn’t a writer these days?) should be clarity, economy, and precision. Attending to grammar is one of the best ways of achieving those results.

If artists are expected to learn to draw the human figure before dribbling paint on canvas, and musicians have to learn the scales before composing atonally, shouldn’t writers have to master the fundamentals of grammar?

As Hemingway said, “You ought to be able to show that you can write a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”

How long should your apprenticeship last? About 10,000 hours. That’s how long it took before I could place a period after that fragment in good conscience.