Interconnected definitions of grammar

Believing that questions of invention and, perhaps, arrangement, better contribute to fulfilling a mission of cultivating our students’ critical thinking and rhetorical efficacy, many in contemporary composition choose to grapple as little as possible with any topic that might be understood to fall under the wide umbrella of all that the term “grammar” can encompass – which can mean everything involving attention to sentences, words, error, style, punctuation, usage, syntax, or word endings. As Anson demonstrates in his essay on error (which he does not call grammar), we have an uneasy relationship with our decision to ignore these issues (5), but there has not seemed to be a path out of the unease. Prompted by the grammar checker, this dissertation hopes to point towards such a path.

That grammar, however unclearly defined, is of central significance to rhetoric and composition is reflected in the fact that an essay entitled “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar” remains the single most reprinted journal article in the field, several decades after its publication (Caouette 57). Written by Patrick Hartwell, it was published in 1985, the same year that sentence pedagogy entered the witness protection program. The piece met and apparently still meets a felt need for permission to ignore the teaching of any topic that might be defined as grammar. Most writing instructors suspect, at the beginning of their careers, or know, after years of pedagogical experience, that the purpose of teaching what we have historically called “grammar” is unclear, that they lack adequate training to teach it, and that, inasmuch as the semi-spoken goal of teaching “grammar” is the elimination of error in writing, the effort tends to fail. A tradition of research, which Hartwell cites, avers that the teaching of “formal grammar” (also unclearly defined) is not only unhelpful to the task of

improving student writing (itself often defined in tautologies) but “harmful” – if only because it steals time from other pedagogies that might improve student writing (Hartwell 105, quoting the most-quoted line from the Braddock report; Paul Heilker sees all discussion of “grammar” since the appearance of this report as “a long series of responses to [this] single quotation” 111).

Hartwell counts himself among the “anti-grammarians” (106): “[t]hose of us who

dismiss the teaching of formal grammar” (107) and for whom “the grammar issue was settled at least twenty years ago” (105). His primary and explicit goal in this essay on grammar is to banish it from the writing classroom as useless (107) – finally, again, and forever – and he insists that “we, as researchers, move on to more interesting areas of inquiry” (127). When he calls grammar “’uninteresting,’” he means, explicitly, uninteresting to himself, in what he calls a “scientific sense” (108), wherefore he presses the entire field of rhetoric and composition to join him in “moving on” – letting him have the last word while they themselves cease to study all topics that he gathers under the heading of grammar research or pedagogy. When he

repeatedly cites linguistics, he means (and also repeatedly cites) Chomsky, not computational linguists such as those then at Bell Labs who were building grammar checking software. Hartwell calls upon the full canon of outdated theorists who have before him banished grammar instruction, unclearly defined. And, in light of that lack of clarity, he offers a useful disambiguation of the word “grammar,” albeit only to be sure that all five of his proposed definitions are accounted for and dismissed. His definitions have proved perennially useful, enough that many compositionists who argue opposite to Hartwell’s position – that some form of what one might call grammar instruction warrants a reconceived place in writing classrooms – use his own definitions in the service of their arguments (see Ray, Style 12; Bacon 291-92; or

Butler, Out of Style 125-28), if usually without noting that Hartwell himself came to different conclusions based on those same definitions. His disambiguation forms a touchstone in

composition and is thus worthy of attention, as we consider what “grammar” means in relation to the grammar checker. His research is also overdue for reframing.

Proffering five definitions, Hartwell offers “Grammar 1” as the actual patterns of word order in language and “Grammar 2” as the study of those patterns, which is to say, a topic in professional linguistics (109). Similarly, Grammars “3” and “4” work together as, respectively, usage (“linguistic etiquette”) and “school grammar,” the attempt to teach linguistic etiquette, using grammar-based explanations of sentences and word use (110 and 119). “Grammar 5” is “grammatical terms used in the interest of teaching of prose style” (124).

Hartwell seems to consider his Grammar 1 – the order of words that makes sense to human beings – as the only true meaning of the word grammar. Grammar 2, linguists at work, perhaps falls under his canopy of legitimacy. But because the human ability to understand and generate sensical sentences need not and, ultimately, cannot be taught – only acquired through extensive exposure – and since neither writing instructors nor composition students are

professional linguists, so ends the conversation about teaching grammar. The rest of the essay, to Hartwell, is an exercise in swatting the irrelevant flies that remain.

He dismisses the most familiar meaning of the word as unworthy of discussion:

“Grammar 3 is, of course, not grammar at all, but usage.” This denotation of “grammar” is the one intended by the “grammar” checker (as Chapter 5 will establish), and fraught difficulties regarding usage and error are exactly the dilemmas most likely to have brought readers to the article in search of understanding. Never mind the egalitarian linguistic principles behind

“Student’s Right to Their Own Language” and the reality that “grammar” means “correct usage” not only in students’ own language but to most of the general public, as well as in the everyday parlance of many compositionists. The airy, dismissive tone – his “of course” is one of many disingenuous style moves in the essay – appeals to the vanity of the expert: the writing teacher dreading usage instruction (“Grammar 4”) or already frustrated with his own attempts to teach error elimination. Contrary to the linguistics ethos upon which Hartwell depends for his theoretical ground, his calling usage “not grammar” is like someone’s insisting that “ain’t” is “not a word.” (See Curzan’s chapter on “Dictionaries and the Idea of ‘Real Words’” 93-113.) But he uses this denotational sleight of hand to sidestep usage as if it were not an issue, much less the very issue at the heart of the grammar wars.

In retrospect, it is notable that this article appeared after, not before, Martha Kolln’s “Closing the Books on Alchemy,” in which she offers a critique of the flaws in the studies that have insisted on an end to grammar instruction in schools. She notes that, among other analytic flaws, the composition researchers condemning “formal grammar” have persistently failed to define what they mean by that phrase (140), and that their conclusions are often tautological (147). But Hartwell tipped his hand from the opening line of his essay (that “the grammar issue was settled for [him] twenty years ago”). Any research he has since read on the topic has served only to reaffirm his foregone conclusions, and the rest of the essay demonstrates a great deal of interest in persuading other compositionists to share his lack of interest. Thus, after presenting extensive research based on twentieth-century linguistics, Hartwell then draws conclusions about “grammar” pedagogy that do not follow from his own data. In his blanket dismissal, he rejects grammar terms for use in teaching rhetorical style, such as Kolln advocates

– “Grammar 5” – as “simply beside the point” (124). To which we must rightly ask, what point? Lest we lose sight of Hartwell’s purpose, it is to convince composition that every category of study and pedagogy related to grammar is useless. Readers cannot be surprised that, having sidestepped the thornier issues surrounding grammar (and “grammar”) in composition, he concludes by urging us all to “move on,” given that he had made up his mind before the research began.

For this research and more broadly, the most significant oversight in Hartwell’s study is his refusal to see the interconnections between his own five careful definitions, which are not the separated categories that he makes them out to be. The latest theories in professional linguistics (“Grammar 2”) may not have reached schoolbook grammar (“Grammar 4”) or may be too complex to present fully there, but the two are still endeavors not entirely isolated from one another, or need not be. Many terms used by professional linguists, such as the names of the parts of speech, are the same ones coined centuries ago for the purposes of grammar

pedagogy and rhetorical style instruction, now still used in multiple contexts. And the inherent structures of meaning in language that need not be taught (“Grammar 1”) are the basis upon which rest most decisions about usage and punctuation (“linguistic etiquette, “Grammar 3”). A writer needing to know whether to use “affect” or “effect” can ask, “Is it being used as noun or a verb in this sentence?” A writer trying to understand why a sentence sounds wrong and needs restructuring, or may be missing punctuation that a reader expects, can ask, “Does this group of words include two independent clauses, or is it a sentence with a participial phrase?”

And, finally, to discuss style (“Grammar 5”), one needs some shared vocabulary for talking about words in sentences. Lacking “grammar,” every writing instructor must somehow

reinvent the wheel of naming words’ functions. Attempts to separate efforts at style instruction or error-avoidance pedagogy from the vocabulary of grammar doom both endeavors to failure, because it is difficult or impossible to discuss the intuited, acquired structures of human

grammar without a terminology for the conversation.