🚀 go-pugleaf

I think I missed the beginning of the debate about the
relative worth of teaching grammar in a writing class, but
I thought I'd toss in my two cents just the same.

I taught in the stultifying, hormone-soaked wasteland of
high school English for five years, and during that time
graded more student essays than most college-level instructors
are likely to grade in the course of several careers.  Besides
learning that teaching high school is perhaps not quite the
lowest pit in Dante's inferno (but close to it), I also learned
some things about the way students write.

I found that the question of the relative importance of grammar
in a writing class was moot, in a sense, because grammar was
tended to take care of itself.  Those students who wrote well
wrote well; they produced (mostly) sensible sentences, well-structured
paragraphs, and essays whose form was both clear and concise.  Those
who wrote poorly wrote poorly.  I never once saw a paper with insightful
ideas expressed illiteratively, nor one in which dumb ideas were expressed
eloquently; I suspect I never shall, and I expect that no one else
has ever seen one either.  It would seem, then, that if a person's
ideas are scrambled they are scrambled, either on the page or in the
head.

One learns to write by writing, just as one learns to drive by driving
and to swim by swimming.  I noticed that by making students write a
lot that some got better and some stayed the same, but that no one got
worse; while I would guess that learning lists of grammatical rules or
going on scavenger hunts for parts of speech embedded in sample sentences
never made anyone a worse writer, it certainly couldn't in any way make
anyone a better writer.  Folks don't get better at swimming by driving.

So, it would make sense to me that the ideal writing course would be
one in which students write a lot, everyday.  A truly gifted high school
teacher once said to me that if you have time to read all the stuff your
students write, it's clear you are not assigning enough writing.  Sure,
it's more fun to teach "literature-based" English courses and easier to
teach grammar courses and *call* them writing courses--but they are not.
They are academic jokes (just ask the students), and should be regarded
as such by anyone who truly wishes to improve students' writing.

Robert E. Terrill
<RTERRILL@UAFSYSB>