CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: C.09: Reconciling the Two Sides in the Grammar War Sharon Robideaux presented “Rhetorical Grammar: A Key to the Golden Gate of Audience Receptivity.” Despite suffering from a Michigan cold, Sharon was able to speak up loudly enough for us to hear even in the less-than-spectacular “rooms” available on the North side of Moscone. Often, the speaker in the next room sounded as though they were right there in the room with us. Both speakers that I was able to see in this panel soldiered on well despite the often-distracting noises emerging from next door; sometimes these loud noises threatened to drown out the session I was trying to listen to, which was aggravating at times for the audience, and flustering as well for the speakers. After noting the traditionally remedial and negative associations of teaching grammar, Sharon pointed out that instead, a more rhetorical discussion of the benefits of grammar would be helpful. If teaching traditional grammar doesn’t work, and we must teach our students grammar in order for them to “get good jobs,” what are we to do? The question for now is probably not should we/shouldn’t we teach grammar; instead, what kind of grammar should we teach and how should we teach it? Advocating a rhetorical grammar which is connected to writing for an audience—for example, offering mini-lessons on grammar, Sharon pointed out that grammar should be in “a decreased but proper role” in the writing classroom. Citing Hairston, Connors, and Lunsford, she again notes that grammar does have an influence, an effect, on the audience. Going back to the rhetorical focus of grammar, she discussed how certain errors bother people more than others (i.e., wrong verb forms, sentence fragments, subj./verb agreement) An interesting personal side note of how grammar (or bad grammar, more pointedly) “is going to cost you”: Sharon related her childhood experiences of being told that her Southern speech would potentially hurt her as an academic. She moved on to note that the form of writing should arise from both the content and the audience. Blakesley argues that grammar is a rhetorical tool at the sentence level and beyond, including larger units of meaning. Even teaching cohesion, transition, etc. is in fact “teaching grammar.” Rhetorical grammar involves consciousness at all levels from the writer about what the effect on the audience will be. Moving to grammar as a part of the writing as it is heard out loud, Sharon explains that certain words and phrases have a particular effect. Leaving the more academic discussion and going towards more discussion of the craft of writing, Robideaux leaves us with a few sentences to think about: “My brother now is dead.” Try rephrasing the sentence with a thesaurus; it shows how “the music and joy disappears.” Another very long sentence from a truck-driver’s book of poetry is technically grammatically “incorrect,” but the effect is hypnotic, poetic—deliberate, rhetorical. Overall, how are we presenting ourselves in our writing? Frances Crawford Fennessy presented “Why Michael, Jose, LaShonda, Christopher, and Jennifer Don’t Know How to Edit: What Has Happened to America’s Future Grammarians?” Offering a very professional handout as well as a PowerPoint presentation, Frances discussed the results of a grammar-based research project based on the definition of “grammar” Patrick Hartwell has offered; this definition is five-pronged and encompasses internal grammar, linguistic science, linguistic etiquette rules, school grammar, and stylistic grammar. The catalyst of the grammar war is a result of the conflicts between prescriptive grammarians and descriptive grammarians—i.e. “teach rules specifically as immutable structures” versus “teach grammar as a flexible, changeable set of structures.” The ACT national Curriculum Survey in April 2003 noted that there is a conflict between the expectations of high school teachers versus college teachers. In other words, college instructors expect that grammar and sentence structures are very important in entering students’ writing; high school teachers found grammar to be the least important. I feel that we do see this conflict all the time, in that many instructors lament the preparation their incoming students possess. The presentation of Frances’ research was interesting. Her survey of three institutions included a 50-question Scantron survey which covered demographics, reading habits, and students’ junior high/high school English experience. It is unfortunate that processing of her research data has been delayed; I would have liked to have heard more. Frances stood away from the podium and the speaker in order to see the PowerPoint presentation better, but as a result it was difficult to hear—and again, this is mainly the fault of the Moscone Center’s setup for the rooms. The presentations towards the back (where the publishers’ setups were) involved far too much expertise in filtering out noise from nearby rooms. I always find it quite satisfying to have several ways of following the presentation, and Frances’ handout and PowerPoint presentation were very helpful for those of us who are primarily visual learners. These supplements were particularly welcome for this setting. She pointed out the variances in knowledge in grammar are mostly common things—their/there/they’re, loose/lose, semicolon usage, etc. An interesting example was the use of “they” with a singular subject, and personally, that’s one that I use all the time. I suppose I’m probably driving many other English instructors crazy when I teach my students that the use of they with a singular subject is becoming more and more common, and that it is an audience-awareness issue. In other words, they can use it in my class without fear of “punishment” because I don’t mind; another class might not be the same. This ties in nicely to the issues Sharon brought up in her presentation about grammar being a rhetorical choice. It would have been nice to have the research data perhaps condensed a bit, shortened up for time—there is never enough time in the presentations as it is, and the fact that we had a very helpful handout meant that, to some extent, we didn’t need to go over the data quite as thoroughly as we did. What brought a few chuckles from the audience was the note from the data that worksheets, drills, and the like were believed to be most effective; “feel free to use them,” Frances noted wryly. She also noted that notes on graded papers were significant for the students. How do we see ourselves (as grammarians)? The people who scored the least well on the grammar test felt that they were “pretty good” at grammar. So definitely there is some disconnect between how we think we present ourselves as grammarians and our actual grammatical skills. This research shows simply that writing skills-and-drills worksheets may not be as harmful as we may think, and that notes on papers is important. Of course, this is a local survey and larger results need to be found. By the way, Frances is happy to have contact from others who are interested in participating. It was interesting to note that the chair allowed questions after each speaker’s presentation, rather than waiting until the end. This, at least for me, seemed unusual, but perhaps it’s a more efficient way of doing things? A question came in to Frances about the skepticism of the connection between reading and writing—so again, more information from a broader population is very necessary. We can’t really take these results too seriously at this point, I think, since they are small and local. Unfortunately, I had to leave before I could see Joseph Salvatore’s presentation, so I can’t really comment on what he had to say. Overall, I feel that the two speakers that I did see presented well, and mainly their work served to reinforce ideas that I already knew—i.e. that grammar is a rhetorical, deliberate choice, and that our conceptions about teaching grammar are often in conflict with our own understandings and knowledge of grammar. I am somewhat skeptical about Frances’ assertions that grammar worksheets and the like are actually making a difference; I am interested to see further information from her research regarding this. It’s always good to hear reinforcement of what we know, and I feel this presentation did that effectively. |
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