🚀 go-pugleaf

It seems to me we need to consider at least two major reasons for not
forgetting about grammar in the teaching of writing:
  1.  Grammatical structures have rhetorical power.  Sociolinguistics
research demonstrates on abiding principle; to become
part of a group one must learn to speak the language of that group.  This
is not to say that one group is "better" than another, but simply that
variation exists and is meaningful.  Grammar is a vocabulary we use to
analyze and discuss that variation.  The idea of a universal grammar for
a language is, of course, nonsense.
  2.  On the level of writing as aesthetic activity, we need to have a
vocabulary for discussing aesthetic effects language creates.  Artists
follow "rules" sometimes, violate them sometimes, and create new rules
on occasion.  Different artists, of course, have different levels of
awareness of the current "rules" in their field; presumably, however,
those trained in the academy will have a high level of such awareness.
  It therefore seems to me that the problem most of us have with grammar
in the writing classroom is not with the idea of grammar as technical
vocabulary, but with the serious deficiences of the grammatical theories
developed thus far, theories which propose a set of universal rules for
the use of language.