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?