Our Disconnect in Training Teachers

Wallace Stegner (2002: 64–65), in On Teaching and Writing Fiction, notes, "Whether dismembered syntax has sprung from ignorance or from the lust after originality, I believe it should be questioned. After all, all a reader knows is the marks on the printed page. Those marks have to contribute meaning." Like Stegner, I think commas matter, as do sentence structures that convey, support, or make ironic the meanings of the words themselves. Ursula Le Guin (1998: 33), in Steering the Craft, puts it slightly differently: our standards for writing, including for grammar and syntax, must be higher than in conversation, "because when we read, we don't have the speaker's voice and expression and intonation to make half-finished sentences and misused words clear. We only have the words. And, to be clear to as many readers as possible, they have to follow the agreed-upon rules, the shared rules, of grammar and usage." When a student spells one word as another or misses a comma after an unwieldy clause, we can downplay its importance, having seen enough similar slips to surmise a larger idea. If pointed out to the student, she sometimes asserts, "But you know what I meant." Do I? Does she want to relinquish control of meaning to me?

I draw my references here from creative writers because I come to teaching as a creative writer. This position gives me a strange cachet in the grammar business. After all, if a poet supposedly exuding a spontaneous overflow of emotion cares about grammar and syntax, it mustn't be all stifling regulations. So, I opt to quote to my students the likes of Tom Robbins and Stephen King instead of Strunk and White, whose work I appreciate more than I expect my students will. Grammar, according to Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux (1997: 171), "sounds stern, forbidding, and worst of all dull. It smacks of the elementary school classroom, of the meaningless dissection of sentences, of onerous burdens laid on the helpless shoulders of children. But if you are really interested in writing poetry, grammar can be something else: a door to rooms you might never otherwise discover, a way to realize and articulate your visions in language." Knowing and talking about grammar, syntax, and style—recollecting in tranquillity, shall we say—is part of immersing oneself in language as a writer and is the student's responsibility when using language to convey ideas. And I now see it more clearly as part of my responsibility as a teacher. The creative writer's approach to grammar, syntax, and style allows me to bring import and enthusiasm to this teacherly responsibility, to assert its power and reward in writing.

In Skinny Legs and All, novelist Robbins (1991: 172) includes a scene in which his characters discuss a word used sloppily, in this case neat. Can o' Beans remarks, "Slang possesses an economy, an immediacy that's attractive, all right, but it devalues experience by standardizing and fuzzing it. It hangs between humanity and the real world like a . . . a veil. Slang just makes people more stupid, that's all, and stupidity eventually makes them crazy." Fair or not, vague, confusing, or inaccurate sentences imply that those undesirable sentence qualities apply to the ideas and, in the world beyond the classroom, to the writer. Grammar and syntax indeed might allow people to articulate, as clearly as possible, the world and, perhaps, to see it clearly as well. As Le Guin notes (1998: 32), "Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion." To be lax with grammar and syntax might both reflect and cause confusion or ignorance.

In recent years, I have taken to spending time on a few carefully selected, well-timed lessons on the importance of grammar, lessons scattered every now and then throughout the term as we discuss writing in each course I teach, whether composition, creative writing, or literature. Some, though certainly not all, of my colleagues have balked, either mentioning the well-documented ineffectiveness of grammar instruction in college classrooms or admitting...