Number 5: for the week of February 18, 2010

My dear readers,

The main issue permeating that which we read is that of grammatical correctness. What is it? Why is it necessary and how did it become so central to all thought about writing? The two articles by Connors trace an historical trail of the current fixation on grammar and mechanics within composition studies. Not simply the teacher being a queen with a red ink pen as a royal scepter, the articles, particularly "mechanical correctness", focus on the fetish with of grammar as symptomatic of an overall growth of hierarchy in all areas of an emerging America. It is only natural that in the early years of the Republic, America would wish, after so many years under the stagnant hierarchy of the British monarchy, to break loose and have, for all intensive purposes, no hierarchy whatsoever. But as let's say, "the Revolutionary generation" faded from the scene after about 1820, those who came after them saw America as needing to fit in with the hierarchies of Europe she had initially left behind.

More generally came the idea that Americans need more than a few years of primary education. Add to that incessant fear on the part of eastern bluebloods that the uncouth nature of the ever expanding Western frontier was polluting genteel society and you have a recipe for eventual standardization in most areas of life particularly grammar. Thus, I suppose you could say that grammar had a small part in unifying America. Though it was at the loss, in some cases, of regionalism and colloquialism in language. They sought to forsake regional dialect in favor of a standard lexicon which became what we call standard English today.

The very fact that there are so many different theories of grammar indicates that linguistically we are not as United as some people might like. I mention this only because I wonder if I have ever had to, in checking for grammar, unwittingly stunt the growth of this generation’s Twain or Faulkner. I mentioned in class earlier in the semester the idea of James Fenimore Cooper's pathfinder Natty Bumpo and the fact that although he is supposed to be an archetype frontiersman he speaks in a manner which is almost Shakespearean. The idea being that American readers of Cooper's time did not at all mind reading about the frontiersman so long as he spoke like a blueblood.

The same idea applies when Connors talks about counting physical mechanical errors in student papers and having correctness cards. In those types of scenarios very little emphasis is given to the content of what students actually write. This tells me that under such a system students can write practically anything they want as long as it is grammatically pristine. I am not sure that is the best course of action. With your kind indulgence, I will now relate a personal example to illustrate what I mean. When I was in my student teaching my university appointed supervisor demanded that I keep a weekly journal. In theory, it was to contain my thoughts and reflections upon the student teaching experience. For the first several entries that is exactly what it contained. However, I quickly found my supervisor only concerned her comments with the grammatical correctness of each entry and, so far as I could see, paid no attention to the actual substance of what I wrote. When I approached her about this she told me flat out "your thoughts are your own business, your grammar is mine."

Flabbergasted by that revelation the next week I tried an experiment. While I kept my weekly reflective journal for my own edification, I did not give my supervisor that entry. Instead I gave her several pages of the first draft of a novel I was composing at the time. I knew those pages were grammatically pristine because I had a friend of mine who was a textual editor help me go over them previously. When I received my journal back the following week the only comment on it was "grammar and mechanics much improved. Keep up the good work." I wonder does it make me a bad person that for the second half of that semester the official journal I submitted actually contained no mention of my student teaching experience but was instead a collection of my previous short prose writings?

I gave the previous example only to illustrate the extreme fixation with grammar that I believe this week articles referred to. The article “grammar grammars and the teaching of grammar” points over and over again to studies revealing that a simple obsession with surface grammar and mechanics not only does not improve the quality of thought expressed in student writing it doesn't even really improve surface correctness in the long-term. Why then such obsession with it? I think it comes back again to Connor’s idea that America, while professing to be a classless society, likes the idea of creating hierarchies and elites and to set certain people apart from the rest of society. I think Butler sums it up very well and he essentially said that the idea of grammar and correctness as we know them today comes from the need to have some way to tell who is doing better and who is not.

Of course, who needs help and who doesn't can depend on who already understands the idea of academic discourse best. In other words who can make their own experience sound academic most readily. In "reflections on academic discourse" Peter Elbow argued, as he does elsewhere, not so much against traditional academic discourse as for inclusion along with it other types of writing. He gives the example that many areas like the FDA and the Air Force require types of writing that are not emphasizing traditional academic discourse. Moreover, along with his previous contention that student experience should build writing assignments he argues that proper writing instruction should try to incorporate as many different genres and types of writing as possible in order to prepare, for instance, a future government worker or military officer for the type of writing they will have to. It is an often ignored fact in university environments that most of the students pursuing higher education do not intend to build a career in academia. Instead they want to get their training in a particular field and get out quickly as possible. Their future careers require types of writing which may or may not have anything to do with the traditional academic writing.

That’s where “responding to student writing” comes in. In Sommers gives the example of the essay that is marked up so bad I can barely read it. She said that the simultaneous demands that the student condensed the essay in some areas and expanded and others serve to confuse the student and muddle the revision process. I don't think I agree with that. While I understand beginning writers may have trouble for performing both steps at once I keep reminding myself that life is not simple and life is not linear. We are often called upon in life to do many things at once.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman