Which do you say? Who's that pie for? Or for whom is that pie?
Who says for whom is that pie? There are a lot of people who believe in the rules, but they don't know what the rules are. Grammar is generally regarded as sort of the North Korea of language. You're terrified of making an error and you're considered to be morally disreputable if you do. Grammar was not dreamed up in some dank basement by a SWAT team of English teachers.
It's grammar, so it's not that, you know, it can't be that exciting. but it can be. It's turned me into a little bit of a grammar snob.
When I read my friends'emails, I have to say, I feel like, ooh, I, it. She knew they weren't supposed to dangle, but she didn't know what a participle was. People should have a conception of what their language is like. They don't see how sentences work.
There's this disconnect between The criticism they're getting and the skills that they have because they never got those skills. What do we want to give our children and our students? It's a good question and it's one that I am torn on. There you go, that's perfect.
Okay. What is grammar? It's like hard to sing as a cousin.
My name is Elizabeth O'Brien. And I'm David O'Brien. Our kindergarten through 12th grade education was pretty typical.
We weren't given much grammar instruction, but what we were given was confusing and boring. We kind of hated it. In college, I majored in elementary education, and, like so many education programs, mine completely ignored grammar instruction.
I was about to have to make the choice so many teachers have to make, perpetuate the cycle of uninspired and haphazard grammar instruction or abandon the thought of teaching it. But I got lucky and crossed paths with a few people who showed me that grammar can be a fun and valuable subject. So I decided to try to breathe new life into it. I started a website and after years of wanting to understand the history and current state of grammar instruction, after hearing from people who had the same questions we did, David and I decided to explore the subject and film our findings.
So we set out on our mission to understand why grammar has faded out of most schools. It isn't being taught. Hear from teachers who are teaching grammar.
I had long felt like the lone voice in the wilderness. And to make our argument for why grammar should be taught. Gives them a real sense of pride. We traveled around the country and met with all sorts of people. But it didn't take long to see that the subjects of grammar and grammar instruction are more controversial than we originally realized.
Before we get to grammar instruction, we need to take a step back and look a little more closely at certain aspects of grammar itself. To start with, what is grammar? There are two ways of understanding grammar.
To a linguist, grammar is just the underlying structure of the language you speak. Everybody has a grammar in the sense that everybody speaks one or another language, and in fact all grammars are... ...of comparable complexity.
It's simply the system that everybody has internalized. For most people, grammar is something else. It's a matter of speaking correctly as opposed to incorrectly.
We speak of incorrect grammar, a notion that to a linguist makes no sense whatsoever. When we talk about English, for example, we say, oh well, the double negative, that's a big mistake, two negatives make a positive, I didn't see none, no, you should say I didn't see any. Now, if you're speaking French or Italian or other languages, that's the normal way to say things.
Non ho visto nessuno. I did not see no one. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. And if you said to an Italian, that's two negatives, it's incorrect, he'd say, what are you talking about?
That's Italian. It's no less consistent. in the varieties of English that use that double negative, then it isn't French or Italian.
There are good reasons, if you're somebody who naturally says, I didn't see none, for learning, at least in certain contexts, to say, I didn't see any. But the reason isn't that you've moved up to a more logical or higher or purer form of expression, just that that's the way standard English works and the form of English that people are expected to use in business context, in public writing, in public life. Grammar.
Grammar is the way we put words together. Linguists use the word grammar to refer to the rules that make up our subconscious systems, while most people use the word grammar to refer to the rules of a particular way of speaking and writing English. Standard English.
Linguists want to describe subconscious rules. Most people want to follow prescribed rules of standard English. So the linguistic perspective is called Descriptivism, and the popular perspective is called Prescriptivism.
Prescriptivism is the perspective behind everyday conversations about grammar. Their grammar is just terrible. They just sound uneducated.
When people post things on Facebook and they blatantly use the wrong there and the wrong your or the wrong to, you're like, what? The wrong your. Yeah. Or to. If you can't figure out to, to, and to.
For years here, we have been giving people a writing test, effectively a grammar test, at the beginning of the interview process. We have found that that is a better indicator for how they're going to do in the job than all of the technical rigmarole we normally put people through. I write columns for the Harvard Business Review on a periodic basis, and I decide to write a column and share our experiences with it. I was kind of blown away by the response because this was the most controversial single article I think the Harvard Business Review has ever run.
Huffington Post ran a few stories about it. The New York Times decided to do a big room for debate where they pick an issue every week and they get experts on either side to argue the issue. The most common response, particularly that you would see in the online comments to the article, were...
I have found in my job that writing isn't the most important thing or grammatical skill isn't the most important thing. Everything else relating to getting the job is important and that's just a detail. And I think a lot of people view punctuating sentences as just a detail and we're very used to communicating via text message and instant message in context where as long as they understood what you said...
Layering on an additional, effectively overhead of proper grammar is unnecessary. And people have justified this to themselves to the point where even in context where they should be using proper grammar, they don't bother anymore. Most of us care about following the rules of standard English, and we look for help.
The immediate problem that grammarly solves is Improving the quality of the paper that the student is going to submit, the memo that the executive is going to send, the sales proposal that the salesperson is going to send off. And while they're doing so, we're working in the background to categorize the mistakes they're making and tee that up to them in a way that they can internalize and understand so that they actually improve the quality of their writing going forward. Mignon Fogarty, also known as Grammar Girl, receives millions of visitors to her website each day. She has a popular podcast, and she's even been a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her career stems from her time as a freelance editor and writer.
My job wasn't to help them learn to write better. It was just to fix their papers. They were scientists, but I found myself wanting to help them. And so I started creating these little five-minute podcasts, almost as just an outlet to scratch that itch that I had wanting to help all these people.
What I found is after I started writing is I realized how much I didn't know myself, and I had to teach myself all the grammar rules. So it was also in sympathy for all the writers who, you know, are working writers but haven't been taught these things that I started producing the Grammar Girl materials too because there's just such a need. Is Grammar Girl right?
Is there a need? Do some people have bad grammar? Does it make sense for employers to consider the grammar of their job applicants?
What do the linguists... with a more descriptive perspective on grammar. Think of this more popular prescriptive approach. It's very interesting to linguists where we all agree that prescriptivism is in some sense silly, that we all have the same emotional reaction that everyone does.
When I see an email with bad grammar, I still have the same emotional reaction sometimes, illogical reaction. Many linguists seem to say that prescriptivism is silly and illogical. Are we all crazy?
Do we all care about something that doesn't matter? Should we stop correcting student papers? Welcome to the Language Wars, a decades-old conflict between prescriptivism and descriptivism.
You do have a number of linguists who say that there is no right and wrong, that native speakers cannot make mistakes no matter what they say. Yeah, I'd done that and I should have went there. I grew up hearing, thou shalt not tell students what to do. Thou shalt not say, this form of language is correct and this form is incorrect. I mean, I was taught not to think like that.
That's basic linguistics 101. When kids are taught to write, they're told, no, do it this way, spell it this way, put these words in this order. And I would love it if we could reach a place where we didn't say, this form of language is better than whatever you came with. But we should be teaching spelling and punctuation and other conventions of standard English, right?
I don't know if I have a good answer to that, honestly. The language wars are kind of incredible, I would say. It's surprising that we're having to fight this fight.
A prescriptivist is simply someone who believes that there are normative principles of language, that we can call something standard English and non-standard English, that we can draw lines and we can say what is better and what is worse from the point of view of the standard language. That's all. Now, there are people who consider themselves prescriptives.
prescriptivists who believe in rules, who actually don't know what they're talking about. They believe in non-rules, such as the idea that you cannot begin a sentence with and or but. Now, that is absurd, and no serious grammarian has ever taken that position. It's quite fine to begin a sentence with and or but, not for third graders, because they want to do every sentence that way.
Every good writer wants that arrow in the quiver of the communication. That's a gossip rule. And to take the two great ones, the split infinitive, you're not allowed to boldly go where no one has gone before.
That's the adverb interposed between two and the root verb. Reputable grammarians have not taken the position that you cannot split an infinitive for over a century. And the big one, of course, is the terminal preposition.
It's a rule that doesn't have a leg to stand on. Notice I just did it and you didn't blink. I've received criticism from both descriptivists and prescriptivists.
In my experience, most people who would be classified as prescriptivists don't know the history. They don't know the variety. You know, they think these things are hard and fast rules that were...
handed down from stone from, you know, I don't even know how they think, but like Middle English to today, and it's all the same, and it's not. I do think every student at some point in his or her education should learn the history of the English language. It's fascinating. fascinating.
You should learn how we started with Old English and you look at Beowulf and you can understand hardly a word of it. And then you get to Middle English after the Norman conquest. When that April with his shard of sota, the draft of March has passed it to the rota. And you realize, I know every one of those words except the one at the end of the first line.
Sota, which gives us soda today, means sweet. We don't have that one and that, but every other one, when that April, with its sweet showers, pierces to the root the drought of March, and we just say, wow, something has happened. You can't say that language change is necessarily good or bad. A lot of language change is superb, but that doesn't mean you just automatically cave in to any change.
What a good usage book does, and what I've tried to do in Garner's Modern American Usage, is to give a snapshot of the language as it currently exists. Take the word, or the non-word, irregardless. It is not a respected word because it's actually a mistake.
You kind of need to think about where along the continuum the change is. An example of a stage 5 misusage would be self-deprecating. It began as a mistake. It should have been self-depreciating.
In fact, it always was in standard English self-depreciating for a couple of hundred years at least. In Garner's Modern American Usage, I was the first ever to say that self-deprecating is now standard American English. Now that's not my...
Dictum, I was able to verify that in 99 plus percent of the instances in which the word is used or the phrase, it is self-deprecating, not self-depreciating in American English. and there's no resisting that kind of universality in usage. Is there anything wrong with saying me and John are going to the store versus John and I are going to the store or he gave the book to Caroline and I versus he gave the book to Caroline and me, the latter, of course, being correct. It matters to people who want to have credibility among others who have education. People who are learning to write or checking their writing against the standard want to know what it is.
That's why dictionaries exist. That's why copy editors exist. That's why we correct student papers, even if conventions are arbitrary.
It's good to have conventions. There's no good reason to drive on the right as opposed to driving on the left. Other places do just fine driving on the left, but it is very important for everyone to do it the same way in a given community. And if you want your fine distinctions of meaning to be understood among your readers, if you want to ease the process of understanding your sentences, if you want to signal that you've taken care in assembly of your prose and hence by extension formulation of your ideas or gathering of your facts, then you want to know what conventions are in force among the community of people that you're trying to communicate with.
Wait a minute, how are we hearing this from a linguist? What about the language wars? What about the prescriptive-descriptive debate?
What about thou shalt not tell students what to do? The idea that there is a raging debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists goes back 60 years, which is bogus in the first place. Of course.
There's an enterprise of descriptive grammar, an enterprise of just talking about the systems that everybody has. There's also, to my mind, it's perfectly reasonable to say some forms of language should be preferred to other forms of language. For various reasons, and not always the reasons that people think. And the idea that these are somehow fundamentally opposed is just a mistake. There is no serious commentator on language who...
believes that everyone should just write however they please and that we shouldn't have a standardized form for academia, for government, for law, for edited prose in general. What has been pointed out is it's a tacit that occurs by an implicit consensus. Second, it can change over time.
Third, many of the so-called rules were idiotic in the first place and there's no reason to follow them. Now, Now, a lot of people uncomprehendingly think that that is tantamount to saying that there should be no standards or instruction or rules or editing or dictionaries. But that's just a crude way of understanding the phenomena of language. There can be value in a standard form.
There's no descriptive, prescriptive debate, or there shouldn't be. A descriptive account tries to discover what the facts are. A prescriptive approach... says look let's modify the facts for one or another purpose like to bring people into a literary culture that's different from their own You're raising an interesting question.
If all languages are the same, then what are you gaining by reading? There is a strong intuition that you're gaining something, and we all want children to read, and we all think it's valuable, and we're all glad we read. But for most things that people care about, for 90% of your life... You don't need the richer vocabulary and the structures that exist only in writing.
Just like it's nice to be able to dress well and to know what looks tasteful, it's nice to be able to speak elegantly and it certainly will help you in life, given the sociological factors that exist. But it's not necessary. It's not necessary to be a human or to have language to use those forms.
Every form of language that can be used for communication has internal structure. It has to or it couldn't be used that way. In that sense, all languages, all dialects are equal. They have the understructure, they have the architecture to do anything that their users require it to do. In some cases, the users of that dialect have not required any more of it than that it suffice as a means of daily communication on a family level, a tribal level.
In other cases, the users of that dialect have decided to erect an enormous superstructure. Poetry, drama, literature. You get much more complex language through reading and much bigger vocabulary through reading.
And when linguists talk about language, they're generally not talking about the written form because most of the world's languages don't have a written form. Grammar instruction is supposed to bring people to understand the literary standard language, which has all sorts of properties that… normal speech doesn't use. To reap the full fruits of American civilization, you need to know, in addition to your own dialect, that one called Standard English. That's the one that most books are written in, and most business reports are made in, and most broadcasts are cast broadly.
But if you're going to just pay lip service to saying, oh yeah, these are all relative, now you have to learn this one that I say is better. What have you done? You've done nothing.
I think standards are really, they're about power structures. They're about the maintenance of power for certain groups. The reason why there is a standard English is because there's a group of wealthy white people, you know, who have decided this is how we are to communicate. We'll get back to that later.
Well, my name is David Mulroy, and I teach classics here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It's true that grammar teachers have, in the past, often suggested various prescriptive rules to follow to improve your style. But the real essence of what they teach are the rules that constitute the meaning of sentences.
This is the type of grammar instruction we never received. We weren't given a big-picture understanding of language. We weren't given an understanding of the key grammatical concepts, the parts of speech, phrases, and clauses, and how they relate to each other. These are the concepts that allow us to make sense of and talk about the world of language.
And it's really a great loss to dismiss that whole discipline together with a few misguided rules about splitting infinitives. When Wisconsin was adopting new educational standards, I... I went to a public meeting to make the case that high school graduates should be able to identify the eight parts of speech. The consensus among educators was that it was a waste of time to teach young students grammar, that it just confused and frustrated them.
I was really dumbstruck by that and decided to look into the issue, so I ended up writing a book called War Against Grammar. The attack on grammar... It really began in the early 20th century with a progressive education movement. You see over the course of the 20th century and into today, these swings back and forth between progressive education, more experimental, hands-on, collaborative, more self-directed approaches to instruction, and traditional instruction, which would be more...
textbook learning, the teacher as expert, as lecturer, more of an emphasis on memorization, and so on. When the progressive movement came in, what you saw were two strands. A number one is this view of the practical use of education. So if we can't see an immediate practical use, to this particular topic, then we're not going to teach it.
That was one strand of progressive education. Learning by doing. Learning about practical everyday problems. The store involves arithmetic.
Operating with each other in... Another strand of progressive education was this idea of what's the ideal? Are we trying to take students and move them to become mature grown-ups? The curriculum changed fundamentally from the teacher coming in as an authority and saying, kids, you need to know that two plus two equals four. You need to know what a noun is.
It switched to, I need to create space. And I need to clear away the influence of the outside world so that the inner child, who this person is, is allowed to grow and to cultivate. And it comes from within the child.
And so you actually see this move towards the adults saying we can learn from the child. The child doesn't learn from us. And the role of the teacher and the student switches or becomes even.
And you see this. Throughout the last hundred years where the teacher ceases to become an authority in the classroom. We must prepare.
our children, not for the world of the past, not for our world, but for their world, the world of the future. This was progressive education as it started out. You have six-year-olds designing their curriculum, deciding what they should study.
We are equipping the child to face his future by learning to face intelligently his immediate present. This youngster is learning that butter is made from cream. He knew that cream came from a cow.
From this one day's project in actually handling food may spring another day's discussion or a further project. The 1960s and 70s are often pinpointed as an era where we experimented with more progressive approaches. Who needs to learn grammar or these kind of antiquated rules when we... should be giving children their own voice, allow them to be developing their own distinctive points of view.
Because who am I to give you rules? Because, you know, I mean, we're all just doing our thing. Even for those teachers who wouldn't call themselves progressive teachers or wouldn't label themselves as experimental teachers. They have embraced on some level some of the progressive ideals. So that's the idea that the teacher's job is to be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.
So you're just supposed to be there to support them in their own independent exploration of the world rather than to be there as an older, more mature, more informed authority who can actually provide them with knowledge that they might not discover otherwise. My name is Lisa Van Dam and I am the director and founder of Van Dam Academy at K-8 School in South Orange County. And I'm also the grammar teacher.
Before I hand back your dictation, let's just go over some of the most common errors. I think there are a lot of reasons to teach grammar. It empowers them to feel that they can be clear, they can be articulate, they can communicate effectively. What is the mistake in this sentence, Kyle?
It gives the kids a conceptual vocabulary for talking about language. Did you notice yourself naturally pause at a certain place? Where is that?
After fell. After fell. So we need a comma after fell. Now, bonus points for anyone who can tell me why. What is at the beginning of that sentence?
An introductory clause. I think one of the reasons that a lot of schools don't teach grammar is that they fear that it's going to inhibit the self-expression of kids. So a lot of teachers talk about the dreaded red pen and that it's some horrible thing that the kids are subjected to and so damaging to their self-esteem and to their feeling that they can just communicate themselves freely.
But in my experience, there's absolutely no contradiction between giving them correction and guidance. And... allowing them self-expression.
In fact, I've found it to be the opposite, that they feel more confident in expressing themselves if they have the means of doing so clearly and they know what the rules are. So even something as simple as how to structure a sentence for a very young child, they're really proud if they know how to really properly structure the sentence. Having a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end, that they know it's this very well formed, very clear and articulate thought, gives them a real sense of pride and confidence in their own expressions. Unless you give the child the idea that it's a bad thing to be corrected, they don't feel like it's a bad thing. They want to know what are the rules that will help them improve the way they write and speak.
I feel like educators tie it to self-esteem in the kids'minds. I feel like they're sending messages. that make the kids feel like it's a bad thing to be corrected.
So I also teach literature, and inevitably when I have a student transfer into my class from another school and they become accustomed to the way schools typically teach literature, they're always shocked by something that they experience, which is that I'll ask a question, and they'll answer the question, and sometimes I'll say, Okay. no, that's not what he was suggesting, or that's not what that character actually meant, or that's not what this represents about the character. And they always look at me with horror, like, no?
I didn't know that there could be a no when we're talking about literature. So I think that that reflects something going on in education on the whole. The part of my book that's most often quoted is an experiment I did with a large group of students, giving them the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence and asking them to paraphrase it.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them a decent respect, to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. A substantial number of them, about half, didn't come even close to the meaning of the sentence. As a group of people, everyone is equal. But when it comes to the laws of nature, only the strong will survive.
It doesn't matter where you came from. In the end, we are all human beings. Humans are at the top of the food chain, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't respect nature. Because we have one Earth, learn to preserve it. Students are typically asked more to react subjectively to texts than to explain what the texts literally mean.
It's an interpretation by free association, getting meanings from isolated words and reconstructing them. Mankind is in a state of separation. There will come a time when all will be forgotten and man will be one with Mother Earth. It's gotten to the point where subjective interpretations are valued more than the actual interpretation of a text according to the rules of grammar and semantics.
Once that's become dominant... That model of literature has become dominant. It leads to the neglect of grammar. When I think of grammar, I just think of public, overworked public school teachers hammering facts and rules into our heads.
The bare minimum is fine as long as they pass standardized tests. You don't really have to teach them to love English. You just have to teach them the pass. A lot of college students come into the university and grammar is like out the window, like they haven't been taught correctly. It wasn't so much forgotten as demoted.
It became a matter of mechanics, basic skills. In the course of that, it was simplified, it was routinized, it was turned into a bunch of rote rules that had no intrinsic interest, that didn't draw you to reflect on language. By the time students come to me, they've had professors write dang in the margins of their papers for years, and they don't know what it means. They don't know what a dangling phrase is. They don't seem to have an understanding of the function of grammar other than, you know, tests.
They should have a vocabulary that helps them to understand language. I say, has anybody had teachers write passive or avoid passive on your papers? And they're like, yeah. And I say, do you know what that means?
No. They don't know about gerunds and participles and prepositional phrases. They just don't seem to know what those are. Somebody speaking a language to them they don't understand and they feel too stupid to say, I don't know what passive means.
There's more than one way of giving students a conceptual vocabulary that allows them to talk about language. More than one way to give them an idea of the structure of language. I live in the Catskills of New York and I'm a Montessori upper elementary teacher. Before I came into the world of Montessori, I really hadn't had any grammar the same way most adults talk about it.
It wasn't until they had a foreign language that they even realized that there was grammar in the world. I had no idea that I would come to love it. I can't even believe I'm saying that right now.
As you know, as you teach something, you learn it. So it was really in teaching it that I really came to learn it and love it. This is a perfect example how we have to look at words and ask, what is this word doing in a sentence? This is a verb.
Verb. A pronoun is like that except for, you know, taller. Taller. I like grammar because it's like a pattern.
There are the boys in our classroom who love the math and they're logical thinkers, and it's the writing that puts them off and it's a lot of the language arts that puts them off, but it's the grammar that grabs them. Because they know there are formulas there and they can work with it. They can figure it out That's what gets them all the propositions are like under over the bridge under the bridge and stuff like that and then This is the interjection.
It's usually it has sometimes if it's strong enough it has its own punctuation mark and it's separated from the rest. It's a peek into the person's emotion. That's what this that's why it's shaped like a keyhole.
So the yellow cheese ran around the house. We're bringing this back. This is something that these kids want and they love it. Look at how they were today. They're so excited to buy it.
You just got to give it to them and give it to them in an interesting way. And they're just like hot to trot for it. Another way of teaching grammar is through sentence diagramming.
This is just for the purpose of making him conscious of the various parts of a sentence. Sort of the, an anatomy lesson of the English sentence. I was teaching a class in short fiction and I cannot remember the story but it has a very interesting first line sort of like that there is a truth universally acknowledged first line and I said you know it's too bad that you guys they burned all the diagramming books because if you guys knew how to diagram sentences I could really show you why this sentence is so interesting and so two students came up to me after class and said we really want to learn this thing we've heard about this thing You know, why don't you teach a class in it?
And I said, nobody wants to take a class like that, but if you can each find three friends, because you have to have six students to make a class here, then I'll teach the six of you. The class attracted over 30 students. My name is Kitty Flory. I'm the author of a book about diagramming sentences called Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, and the subtitle is The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences. The book started with a little essay that I wrote, just a sort of nostalgic, fun essay about growing up in the 50s with this wacky system.
I don't know how many emails I got about this book, and I was interviewed all over the place. People went crazy over this idea. So many people had never heard of it. It was eye-opening for a lot of people.
This sounds really cool. In the mid-1800s, an English professor at a boys'academy in upstate New York wrote a book called a practical grammar in which words, phrases, and sentences are classified according to their offices and their various relations to one another. It classified words in a sentence by putting them into these ovals and then connecting the ovals so that it looked like a fleet of airships.
Or what it really looks like to me are those balloon animals that they make at carnivals and stuff for little kids all twisted together. It's really kind of crazy looking. It was in use. for maybe 30 years until it was improved upon. Two professors from Brooklyn, Reed and Kellogg, devised a better way to show a picture of language.
The book came out in 1877. It went through a million different editions. And the whole concept, exactly the way that they devised it, was still being used in schools when I was in sixth grade and is still being used occasionally here and there in enlightened school districts today. I remember it as being fun, but This is not a memory that is shared by my entire class. There were people who hated it.
Miss Michelle taught us to diagram sentences in ninth grade. I used to hate it. Now I bought a book on diagramming because I think it's...
It's a very clear way to define the function of words in a sentence. You can see them, it's diagrammed. And it really did help me think about sentences in a different way, like to recognize a prepositional phrase and identify the subject. It was a very useful exercise.
As I taught these parts of speech, I was also diagramming. And it got to a point where they really, most of them, not all of them, liked diagramming. It made sense, and also it was fun.
That was the most valuable thing I learned in all of my education, up through the PhD level. I mean, as one student said, she said it's like taking a class in Scrabble. You know, it's a game to them.
I loved diagramming sentences as a child, but I was the sort of person who loved diagramming sentences. I think because I'm a visual person, because of the final product of what you get with a diagram, that's actually probably more of my interest, discovering what that sentence is going to look like, and then the challenge of... You can't get away from it.
You have to chew on every single word and its job and there's no playing with that. So to me that's quite punk rock. Like to me that's like that is so hard and that is so rockin'.
Diagramming is a way of focusing in really deeply on the language that we take for granted. I think that's probably something that's good for children to do because their lives are very fast and everything is geared toward a test. It's geared towards just getting it done.
There's a lot to accomplish in the school day. It really makes you slow down and look at writing, look at what you're writing, look at a sentence and how it's put together and try to understand it. When you do linguistics, you do a different kind of diagramming, as you might know.
But in the early going when I was teaching that, it was commonplace to critique and in some ways disparage the traditional grammarian approach. So my first memory back then is, oh yeah, those sentence diagrams, they don't do a perfect job. like transformational grammar would do. But, you know, there's still a lot of useful things that the traditional sentence diagramming structures would show a student.
And so I began to see that the transformational grammar, while that was powerful for linguistics, it was not very accessible. To make grammar accessible to his students, he developed sentence diagramming software using the traditional method. A lot of times their eyes open up, you know, there comes this moment when the structure, as explained in a diagram, tells them something. And I never thought of that as my favorite response, you know.
When I get that, I feel like I've done a good job that day. When you examine what you do, it's going to be better. You know, the more you look at it and the deeper you go into it, the better it's going to be. And if students are trained to do that in the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th grades, that will, we would hope, carry over.
to all their writing and all their thinking and all their reading. I think sentence diagramming is useful. It's an important thing.
I think it's good. I think people learn to think about language. It slows them down.
They, you know, they learn to talk about language. It does have some corollary effects for editing their own prose and so on. Not much.
but some. But because there are a lot of kids who had none of that stuff who still write pretty well. I mean they do come out writing well.
It seems to me there are two different ways of experiencing grammar. There's almost an intuitive sense of grammar when you hear good writing it just sounds right. It looks right on the page.
And I don't know how to teach that kind of intuition about language, except through a lot of practice and reading excellent texts. And then there's a more explicit approach. Let's take an area like punctuation. Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me, the carriage held but just ourselves, and immortality. Well, because I could not stop for death, comma.
It's an introductory adverb clause. Always a comma. Just about always. but I don't know what a clause is. It gets a little tough then to teach that.
I think that it's important to have an understanding of the grammar of your speech for two reasons. One, if your home language or dialect is one that happens to be generally despised, it can really help in terms of... in terms of your self-image, in terms of your ability to advocate for your group, and just in terms of being a part of society, to understand that the way you speak has rules.
In terms of standard English, to know the grammatical structure of your language is something that will enable a person to be more articulate. Good writing and communication is throwing up the fewest barriers to the reader. As a writer, You're like a swan.
A swan is up on the top of the water. That's the way your prose goes. Underneath there are those little feet going But the reader never sees or hears that if you're good at it.
But if you start violating your voice and your grammar level, it's going to start coming in. Even if you're going to break the rules, it helps to know them at first. And it's unfortunate to see that even in high places like elite universities today, many students have never been taught that kind of thing.
Because what you notice is that perfectly ordinary students... 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, were capable of writing on a level that flabbergasts us today. We think they must have been geniuses or they must have been members of the elite, but no.
It was part of the drinking water, it was part of the DNA of society to train people in rules of grammar. Today we think of it as old-fashioned, but what it means is that back then, a perfectly ordinary person could come out of eighth grade writing in a way that would win almost anybody but the very most talented college students today. And there's something to be said. for that kind of articulateness, even if today it would mostly be on the written level. Especially because today writing includes email, writing, depending on what you call it, includes texting.
You write more today as an ordinary person than you did 25 years ago. Everybody has a writing footprint. They have a bevy of structures that are their favorites and they go to them over and over and over again. It might be a good bevy of structures and it might not be a good bevy of structures. My objective in working with people to improve their writing is to enlarge their writing footprint.
And you do that by becoming acutely aware of the structures that the English language makes available to you for writing and speaking. might not sit and think in absolutely grammatical terms, okay, I think I have two sentences here. I'm going to make the first one an adverb clause and put them together.
Or I've got a sentence that's too long, a sentence that's too long. So I'm going to take this long relative clause, adjective clause with a who in it, and I'm going to pull that out and make it a separate sentence. I may not be thinking quite that explicitly, but. I'm thinking in terms of the units, because Grammar has helped me to see those units.
Well, I read an article once after the 9-11 tragedy that said, we could have got him, we should have got him, C-O-U-L-D-O-F. That person has no idea what the word of is, has no idea what the auxiliary verb have is. And it's because he was brought up in a public school system that had concluded that there's there's no connection between grammar and learning to read and write.
Yes, you can get people speaking and reading and writing language simply by listening and reading and writing. But if you don't have any kind of study of the structure of language, these people are going to open themselves up for grotesque mistakes that can be career-threatening. I sensed a real falling off of the teaching of grammar in the 70s, in the wake of the 60s.
Some of the reasons, I think, were these. I think the prescriptive ideas, well then it makes some people better than others because they master standard. And that became, we're more and more equal.
We don't want to discriminate against people. Grammar was suddenly thought to be restrictive. It would stop a student's or a writer's creativity if he or she had to think about grammar and sentence skills.
We don't need that right now. What we need is freedom of expression. Let them be free to write.
We had free writing, free writing. And then that exacerbated with your self-esteem movement. Because, you know, if I tell you your writing is wrong, I've hurt your self-esteem. Grammar's hard.
Because the rules are the rules. It will intimidate students. Composition instructors are too busy.
So get rid of it, that way we don't have to deal with it. When I was a child, the classes were ranked according to ability. Now we don't have that anymore.
So you teach to the middle or you teach to the bottom. And also in the 50s and the 60s, X percentage didn't go to college. I mean, I went to an extremely good high school in Huntington, Long Island, and maybe 20 or 30 percent of the kids were expected to go to college. I mean, that was it.
The rest got traded. grades and made twice as much money. Now, 100% of the kids are expected to go to college. How do you deal with it again? You have to dumb it down.
I couldn't teach writing if they didn't have the basics. And so my students would say, well, tell us more about the basics. Why didn't we get this before? I said, because the trend in the United States at the time that you were in school was not to teach grammar.
It was that you would, by osmosis or some miracle way, you were going to learn it through reading. reading and peer editing and all that. The direction is that everybody's wonderful, nobody has to be a winner, everybody's great, and mediocrity is good.
And I don't buy into that. I think we're watering down the system a good bit. It doesn't seem as relevant as learning business practice, for example. We've seen the rise of that.
Managing the school store is an advanced exercise in practical business. Where's the relevance? It was an age of relevance.
And remember, in education, all you need is something to slip away from one generation, and then the sequence gets lost. Talking to teachers, public school teachers, and I don't want to sound snooty, so I am a public school teacher. How do you approach public school teachers who haven't been taught grammar themselves?
You sound like you're from the 19th century, you're weird, we're talking a foreign language, you know. We need to really teach grammar. Well, we do.
We do these worksheets. But it's short-term. You fill out the worksheets, you take a quiz, and poof, it's gone.
It was about in 2007 when I had a group of seniors who begged me to teach them grammar. Mr. Olson, we need to know grammar. Please teach us grammar.
And it was at that point I realized science teachers and chemistry teachers know what molecules are. Algebra teachers understand the quadratic equation, and it was at that point where I began to realize that I needed to know grammar better myself to be able to systematically teach these seniors. I came from the high school classroom, and I wanted to be able to influence the way that people teach in high school. And that's why I love trying to make grammar fun.
I want my students to go out and teach grammar. That sounds great, especially in light of some new studies. But many teachers who want to teach grammar explicitly are told by opponents of grammar instruction that the evidence says not to. But the main reports the grammar opponents point to have some problems.
Take the 91 report. All it really proved is what we already know. The haphazard and sporadic grammar instruction we were subjected to as students is worthless.
There's definitely room for debate on the extent to which grammar instruction affects writing ability. But many teachers are told that it's case closed. Teaching grammar is useless, even harmful. They are not completely happy that we teach grammar as a discrete subject.
They feel it's sort of artificial to teach it outside the context of, you know, some text. I'm only concerned that we're talking just about usage and we never get to grammar. So you don't learn those terms that everybody who talks about grammar...
can use with ease. I want students to actually see the structure. Here's the analogy I make, and I don't know how well it works anymore, so you have to think more like a 1965 car opening up the hood and somebody telling you, oh all you need to do is just fix that carburetor.
Well if I don't know the difference between my carburetor and my, and I mean this is how little I know, I don't even know anything, I don't know the parts of the engine any more than my students know the parts of speech. So I have students who can't even put a sentence together. I mean literally, they don't see how sentences work. It's just like under the hood of the car, a bunch of wires and a bunch of tubes and parts.
And as long as you kind of get them all together and you have a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end, then it should work. They don't see how everything works together. So oftentimes students who have really clunky sentences or lots of mechanical errors and they can't fix it on their own, Faculty refer them to this class. I also get students who are really good writers, who love the class because it gives them more tools for becoming even better.
They love writing and they want to write even more elegant sentences and so this gives them ways that they can experiment with sentence writing and be able to talk about it. It is in a positive because it renames the subject claim. They start seeing things they hadn't been able to see before.
I think having a certain confidence that they know how language fits together should mean that they have more confidence to speak as well as write. Several of them have moved on down to they're tutors in the writing center now. They feel confident enough to do that.
This is what's gratifying. Is that in their course evaluations at the end of the term they say, every student going to college should have to take this class. They don't even limit it to English majors. I feel like this guru almost, like I'm showing them the light.
In any given class I have 28 students with 28 different backgrounds, 28 different skill levels, sometimes 15 different languages. Let's do a clause. You got it, Stephanie.
Good. When you have that deep knowledge of sentence structure, you can decode just about anything. It's the best life tool you can have. It crosses disciplines, it crosses dialects, it crosses technologies.
Let's make everybody appreciate it, respect it, and love it for what it is. Students that understand grammar have this special insight into discourse in whatever form it takes. My wife for many years used to teach at the, taught at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard.
She was teaching reading specialists, and she told me that a lot of them didn't know what a relative clause was, didn't know how to read a dictionary, couldn't figure out the pronunciation guides, didn't understand what... passive is and so on. People should have a conception of what their language is like.
Basic familiarity with some of the terms is part of being literate, right? It's part of an education. I think that it is good to have grammar instructions to provide writers, everyone for that matter, with a vocabulary so that they can think more clearly about how they use language.
For a writer to know what the tools are that he or she is using is as valuable as a gardener learning words for different parts of a plant and different gardening implements, or a photographer learning the different parts of a camera. It's extraordinarily valuable. Yeah, you should have kind of an appreciation.
and even love of your own language, which comes from knowing something about it. The collapse of traditional grammar is one that's left its mark everywhere. It's not just the kids coming out of the schools.
It's the grammar teachers themselves. It's the writers at The New Yorker and The New York Times. Look at all these complaints that people make about the overuse of the passive. About anywhere from 50% to 75% of the time, the construction that they're describing is not a passive at all.
They're routinely misidentifying a construction that everybody would have known in 1925, coming out of a good school. It is a serious problem. Kids should learn to think about grammar in school, whether in terms of the traditional categories or the new categories, but it should be done.
With respect to the question of why grammar instruction is so charged, such a controversial subject, I think that we have to recognize how grammar is so intimately tied to a question of status. It's a profoundly important indicator of both personal and collective identities, and so for that reason, I think it's particularly charged. Proper or correct English. Correct English in a way is a euphemism for be more like me.
If you just be more like me. That is not about lifting up people, that's not about liberation, that's about oppression and marginalization. The reason that a lot of schools stopped teaching grammar in a formal way is because of a new fashion that arose particularly in schools of education, which said that teaching the rules of standard English grammar was a political action and that it was oppressive to people whose home dialect or home language is something other than the mainstream, wonder-bred standard. And so, for many people, that meant that to teach nouns, adverbs, verbs, what a quote-unquote proper sentence was in the old-fashioned way, was not just old fashioned, but rude. That it didn't acknowledge the plurality among people and the way they talk.
I'm at a predominantly white college. So the black vernacular is really not popular. And you know, you kind of get looked at a little sideways.
Like, why are you saying ain't or can't or you have a twang or... Instead of saying outside, I'm saying outside. Like, kind of like that. And my family's from Arkansas, too. So in my private, like, in the private closed doors, like, we say stuff like, oh, I'm chilling at the crib or things like that.
And at home. I know what I'm saying, but I feel like if I'm in a different group, in a different setting, I'd say, oh, I'm going home to relax. It's who you are. That's how you talk.
If you're from Arkansas, then that's how you speak. Like that... it is what it is and why does it have to be viewed as ignorant? It's important for students to learn standard English.
There's really no excuse for not teaching anybody in society what the code is that is considered socially acceptable because the simple fact is that whether we like it or not, there's always going to be a certain way of speaking and a certain way of writing that's considered the proper one. However, what should change is the idea that when people casually speak or write in ways other than that standard way, that they're doing something wrong rather than something different. And it's really hard to wrap your mind around that because we're so often told that there's something called grammar, that it has certain rules, and if you break those rules, it's wrong in the same way as doing arithmetic the wrong way.
But it really just isn't true scientifically. There was increasingly this sense among English teachers that if we teach children standard English, we are necessarily criticizing for those who Who grow up in houses where dialect is spoken, we are stigmatizing their parents, and we're teaching these children that what their parents say is wrong, and we shouldn't do this. And by the way, that's a danger.
I mean, it is a serious linguistic problem. There has to be some kind of balance between respect for natural speech and recognition that certain types of natural speech just aren't going to fly in certain contexts, and these contexts are often contexts that are very important. If they don't learn anything about good usage or about standard language, are we not condemning them?
Obviously they're not going to be radio broadcasters or they're not going to be news anchors. What exactly are they going to be? Are they going to be courtroom lawyers?
I doubt it. You don't want this stigma to follow kids around where they feel like... There's something wrong with the way their parents talk and with the way they talk.
But is there something to teaching a standard? Is that something that schools should be doing at all? It's a good question.
it's a good question and it's one that I am torn on I'm torn I believe firmly that all students should be embraced valued and their expertise should be highlighted, spotlight shown on them to say you are a fascinating person, I am so interested in what you have to say, it doesn't matter what accent you say it in what language you say it in, it doesn't matter how you present yourself, you are a fascinating person a valuable person and you are a smart person. I believe that to be 100% true. On the other hand, there may be some utility in teaching students what some say or some call standard English. But there's an asterisk there.
There's an asterisk and it's a big asterisk. I think there is room for conversations with young people to say, look, the world in many places is... unfair, it's unkind, we live in a racist society. One thing that might help you would be to learn this, this, and this.
Is there something good about a standard? I am not supportive of a standard in language. I think in a perfect world there wouldn't be a standard.
What there would be, there would be many ways. There'd be many ways to express and communicate oneself, rather than a standard. If we don't, for the most part, use words the same way, we can't understand each other. There are so many advantages to having a standard language.
It's not just driven by who. By who's in power. Having a standard language is hugely important in culture and education and economics. When you learn the standard language you get many more resources than you have from just knowing a spoken dialect.
I see your point. I do see your point. But I also, I am not a person of color.
But if I tried, with all my might, to imagine myself in the shoes of a person of color, I would look... at a standard with suspicion. Who gets to define what is or isn't standard English?
It is quite possible that writing, for example, could be racist if it doesn't value or embrace the way certain students express themselves. This is a controversy in the field of education that's very rich and I think it's very also, it's like, become polarized in this way that it doesn't need to have been. A true grammar teacher says all dialects are rich.
But we just want you to learn this one too. In your business life, in your reports, anything that requires some formality, you need to be bi-dialectal. And just as you say to your best friend, hey Billy, how's it hanging today? And to your priest you say, good morning, Father Smith. You don't say, how's it hanging, Father Smith?
And to your best friend Joe, you don't say, good morning, Joseph. Your pal. It's context. Being good in language is code switching, and you need to know the standard as part of the code, in my view. I think we all code switch all the time.
What children say on the playground is wildly different from what children say when they get home and they talk to their parents. What children say on the playground is wildly different from what they say to their teachers. Where I grew up, in rural Vermont, I grew up in a rural area.
There's a distinctive accent. There's distinctive speech patterns. Basic grammar would have been inverted or transformed in some way. I grew up saying, me and Brad are fixing to play golf.
There's a rich language with its own, you know, specific tones and resonances. But, you know, when it comes to reading, when it comes to writing, I think that you move to a different format, you move to a different genre. One young lady, a friend of mine, I met at Cornell. She's from Haiti. When I met her, again, she spoke in standard English, shall we say.
One winter break, I drove her back home. She's from Brooklyn, and I grew up just outside of Manhattan, the north side of Manhattan. I drove her back to Brooklyn, and I met her family and her friends. And the second she stepped out of the car and introduced me to her family and friends, she had transformed into really a different person. The way she communicated changed entirely.
Her demeanor changed entirely. Even the way she walked. walked changed noticeably changed and she said it's what I have to do you move about more freely in society and again I from a non-standard family I learned standard English I ended up teaching at st. Paul School in Concord New Hampshire one of the archetypal Church British boarding schools in fact I was head of the English department That was good for my life. She may have benefited.
The question is at what cost. What cost to her psyche, her personality, or to her family? We shouldn't have to ask or demand that certain students pay that price.
It's not fair. I'm coming to this university to hopefully become a professional in the real world. I have to use that.
I can't say, you know, it's going to negatively impact my psyche if I use... standard English within these reports. I feel like being in the environment that I am in, it was very important for my grandmother to read me books and to expand my vocabulary and to be serious about that with me.
Or else I feel like as a black woman I would not have survived at the University of Minnesota. Like period. I feel like that's the truth.
When young people are exposed to different things they're exposed to different vocabulary and they are exposed to the standard vocabulary of America or of whatever setting you live in. And if you don't meet that, and if you don't know certain vocabulary, and you don't know how to speak a certain way, it sets a uh, like to me since childhood for you to fail in certain environments. If I want to be um in a certain space or a certain place or I want to reach some sort of success, I have to be, I know how, I have to know how to wean in and out. Do you wish that people would just accept Black vernacular English more or do you think that it's good that you've kind of kind of picked up this other standard dialect that you can kind of go back and forth between?
I think both. I really think both. It's not like I'm in class like, well, why can't my professor speak how we speak?
Like, you know, nothing like that. Because I think it's good. Um, I think it's both. Human beings are complex, smart, and readily adaptable. In order for, to make ourselves understood, to be persuasive, we all conform or...
to certain linguistic conventions. We can all partake in myriad forms of communication without doing violence to each individual form or format. If a student graduates from high school and does not have a grasp of standing up standard English to be able to write a convincing cover letter. We failed that student. If we're valuing what all students bring to the classroom, if we have an asset-based approach with students, all students, I think it's fair then to provide tools for communicating in, again, I wouldn't like the word standard, but if you want to say standard, we'll say standard English.
What would you call it? Hmm. That's a good question.
Again, because to me, whenever you say standard, I'm thinking about who was at the table when it came time to define standard. And I'm really skeptical about that group of people because I... I'm already envisioning a group of folks, you know, who are just wealthy white landowners. Anytime you say there's a standard, you're excluding people. And that smells like intolerance.
It's not. It's just it smells like it. And they want to. to avoid that altogether.
So maybe, um, nah, see, it's all bad. I think there's a sense, and I think it's misguided, that standard English is somehow exclusively white, is somehow exclusively upper middle class, is somehow elitist. And I just think that's completely wrongheaded. More common language inheritance, how we think about writing, how we think about rhetoric, how we think about poetry, you know, has not just been influenced and shaped by, you know, dead white males to use the language of the culture wars. Basically every single group that's ever been represented in the United States has in some ways, even if it's subtle, has in some ways shaped the way that we speak, the way that we write.
and the way that we think. So to deny that common inheritance, I think does a real injustice because it sets up a barrier. Oh, okay, well, I'm from rural Vermont, and the way that they speak in the big city or the way that they speak on the radio or on the NBC nightly news, that's something fundamentally different from me.
I can never do that. I'm from the south side of Chicago. The way that they talk at the University of Chicago is posh, to use a British term. And I can never speak like that.
And it's foreign. to me, it's foreign to my culture. I think that's distinctly unhelpful.
All of us should have access and be able to claim ownership of what is our common inheritance, what is a common linguistic tradition in the United States. So setting up these dichotomies between this is yours and this is mine, it just seems distinctly unhelpful to me. The teaching of grammar and the importance of grammar has historically been as much a program of the left as the right, because it was going to erase the difference.
between the working class, the oppressed working class, give them the power. It was empowering. It's only recently that this association of progressivism with the attack on grammar has emerged. In no place in the world do high-status, well-paid people not speak what's considered the standard.
I guess I think it's unrealistic to think that our teaching practices can somehow subvert or undo that system. What we've set out to do is improve communication. And so what really matters is that we're not just is making sure we have a standard by which everybody can clearly communicate.
It facilitates commerce and especially culture and literature. It's a passport. It opens up a world of tremendous beauty and enjoyment. Standard English is valuable to learn.
It tears down walls. Studying grammar is valuable because it gives us an understanding of how language works. And it helps us better understand the rules of standard English.
But how did we get here? To a place where standard English and grammar instruction aren't valued. I think in a perfect world there wouldn't be a standard.
The teachers don't want to do too much correcting because, well, for one thing they're not sure that they have the right to correct. The way the world should be is a place where you could be embraced for who you are no matter how you present. But in any case they don't want to thwart the kid.
They don't want to crush the kid's native genius. And there will be no one better nor worse. Maybe we need to rethink what we're trying to achieve through education. The love of grammar or like the love of English, it's like a proud feeling. It's having a feeling of connectedness with the piece that you're working on.
It's not about being part of an elite club. It's about being able to communicate clearly and being able to have the confidence that you're capable of communicating clearly. The subject of grammar has been...
It's been dominated too much by an approach where you're terrified of making an error and you're considered to be morally disreputable if you do. The way to think about writing is like mastery of any skill. you can make mistakes in cooking and in photography and you can be a bad gardener but we don't heap contempt on a beginning gardener who doesn't get his tomato plants to grow right we provide more advice and when you learn to garden, you don't kind of cower in fear about being exposed to some kind of ignoramus.
You look at successful examples and you take pleasure in becoming better, and that's the way we should master the skill of writing. The rules are meant to help you formulate your own thoughts in a more strategic and powerful fashion. What is education? Education is observing swirling data.
all around us and snatching significance from this world. It gives you a structure rather than just this on rushing stream. Well, it reminds me of what I always say about the science curriculum, that what I want for the kids is not to come out of a science class being able to recite memorized empty gibberish.
I want them to walk out the front door of the school. look outside and say, ah, that makes more sense to me now. I understand that better because of the things that I learned in science. So I guess that more broadly is what we want from education.
Looking out at the world and finding order in something that appears chaotic and looking out at the world and finding value and purpose in something that just appears chaotic. I think both of those are built into education. What do we want to give our children and our students?
What we want to do is give them power tools, things that they can bring out and apply to the world to organize it and make sense of it and make their stand. And that sounds aggressive, but what I mean is do what they want to do. We're finding a way to describe these statements that escape from here in our faces. And how wonderful if we can describe every one of them.
And it doesn't take that many. Descriptors, wherein you can describe everyone, every single one, and then you start saying, gee, maybe, you know, a little prepositional phrase there, or gee, at the end of the paragraph, do I start with just the subject verb, or can I hook them on with a phrase or a clause? Conscious mastery just expands your ability to utilize those concepts.
There's nothing wrong with conscious knowledge. It's an advantage. Language is something that human beings created. The more we understand it, the more we understand ourselves. My God, what's more important in the class?
Man, only the thing that makes us human, that's all it is. Language. As far as we know, a lot of those pre-hominids and even some of our contemporaries, and we're not sure about Neanderthals and so on, but did not have a generative language. They had the pipes. But somehow there wasn't quite the connection here to get the pipes going.
We are the ones that linked thought to language. What an invention! Language is like the air we breathe. It's invisible, it's all around us. We take it for granted.
But without it, we'd be in deep trouble. We wouldn't be the humans that we are. When we step back... And think about the air that escapes from the holes in our faces. We are just in for a lifetime of discovery.
Oh