Get Your Grammar War On

I've just begun reading a book titled The War Against Grammar, by David Mulroy, a professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In our class last week, we began discussing misperceptions of a writing or communication center as a place to get grammar "fixed"--whether that means seeing the center, in Michael Pemberton's words, as a hospital, a prison, or a madhouse.

I've always tried to make clear to students, tutors, and fellow teachers that I like grammar (look--I'm reading a book about it at home! for fun!) and I like teaching it; I get strange comfort from diagramming a sentence. I do think that the way we should teach grammar to, say, a fifth-grader should differ from how we teach it to a first-year college student, and I think the kinds of things we emphasize differ, too. I would love a world in which every student used perfect grammar (and punctuation and mechanics and syntax) all the time, and I would never argue that it doesn't matter. But I do often wonder how we can break a 19-year-old of a comma splice habit besides just circling it a dozen times on a paper. And I do think carefully about the way a center like ours identifies itself on campus. I noted that one anonymous tutee made this comment on a tutorial evaluation last year: "I don't appreciate having the Writing Center tell me they're too good to help me with grammar." So I think we (I, tutors, mentors, and others who support our work in their classrooms) need to clearly articulate what we mean and why we believe what we do; I'm sure I'll muse more about this and seek more comments later.

For now, I'll quote one paragraph from Mulroy, in which he argues why it's important for every one to be able to list and define the eight parts of speech [can you?]:

The meaning of a sentence is created in part by the rules of grammar. Of these, the most important apply not to individual words but to whole classes of them--i.e., the parts of speech. For example, a declarative sentence is a proposition about a subject, which is represented by a noun or a pronoun. The sense of the proposition is contained in the predicate, which begins with a finite verb--not a participle, and so on. Though we understand the sense of most utterances intuitively, the only reliable way to interpret obscure one is through grammatical analysis, and that presupposes knowing the parts of speech.

Agree?

Rhetoric: Black Hat or White Hat?

I know we've already been discussing the fact that while "rhetoric" in itself should be a neutral term, people (at least outside of academics who study and teach rhetoric for a living!) tend to use it in a negative sense. Out of curiosity, I searched a few news sites for recent articles in which the word "rhetoric" was used; here's just a sample (the first four are from the New York Times; the second is from the UCLA student newspaper):

"Iranian Rhetoric Aside, It May Be Time to Talk"

“The common complaint about the government is there is a lot of lofty rhetoric, but the achievement always falls short,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said.

"But some critics say Mr. Huckabee’s crusade has more rhetoric than substance."

"...Council meetings where rhetoric has traditionally predominated over substance."

"As a person who does not share her views, I want to sound back to her that the use of some of the more rhetorical hot buttons, like 'religious right,' is a huge turn-off."

...I glanced through a hundred or so hits from my "rhetoric" search, and about the only non-negative use I saw came in an obituary of a professor who had taught courses in rhetoric. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I thought that perhaps some reporters and commentators out there would have a sense of the positive uses of the word, too.

So...my challenge to you: Report back to this blog with any quotation from any media (from news on TV to a website to a book you're reading in another class) or from daily life in which someone uses "rhetoric" not as a pejorative but as a positive concept. Ready?

Replacement: A Possibility?

So, classrooms shouldn't be replaced by writing centers, right? But the fact is that many of our teachers today are semi-illiterate, all except for Hillory Oakes. Many ask for students to write papers, and grade them according to their taste, as opposed to actual structure and form. Students too are seldom taught in high school the basics of grammar and language. Writing in college after so many years of neglecting the rules of English, a writing center can effectively re-establish the rules of our language.

Geography Major

Mary will have to correct this post to be exactly right, but I'm pretty sure this is what I overheard while she was tutoring a student this past Friday: "Apparently Manhattan is actually in New York City, which I guess everyone knew but me."

(Close to how you remember it, Mary?)

Punctuation Marks + Comedy = Rhetoric (?)

Remember that rhetoric is, at its core, an examination of language (we'll leave the nonverbal out of it for now)--the words chosen, the meanings intended, the purposes achieved or not, etc. On the first day of the Rhetoric and Communication class we demonstrated this with the exercise in which we compared, say, what people mean when they say "euthanasia" as opposed to what other people mean when they say "doctor-assisted suicide."

But even smaller units of the sentence can have rhetorical weight...like my use of ellipses (the dot, dot, dot) just there or the question mark at the end of sentences, titles, even fragments. The Daily Show continues to offer some of the best rhetorical analysis around, as in this segment synopsized by one of the bloggers at Language Log thus:

Stewart observes that CNN uses question-marked story captions as a way to establish "existential" topics -- roughly Rumsfeld's method, though sometimes applied to flag outlandish subjects like "End Times" -- whereas Fox News uses rhetorical questions as a sneaky way to insinuate things that it doesn't dare assert.