Why teach grammar?

[bethben]

I am wondering what is the point of teaching grammar? I have put two children through rod and staff English and both of them can diagram sentences with little problem. They know grammar. But what's the point? I am questioning it for my last child. She does IEW so we're constantly talking about verbs and adverbs and proper sentences structure. And you get to any standardized test and all they care about it proper sentence structure. If you read good literature, you'll get that anyway correct? So why teach grammar?

 

 

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[lanalouwho]

I think a lot of grammar is taught through exposure. Some kids can pick it up and internalize it, so an actual grammar curriculum just reinforces and gives the proper terminology. Some kids need more direct instruction.

 

 

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[Ms Brooks]

I think grammar helps when learning a foreign language, editing, and writing with style and grace.

[forty-two]

WRT reading good literature is enough to pick up proper sentence structure and do well on standardized tests - not in my experience.  I got very little grammar as a kid - basically the eight parts of speech in elementary and that's it.  I read a ton and did pick up a lot of intuitive knowledge of grammar, and generally wrote well enough by the "does it sound right?" method.  And that was fine for the state tests, and mostly good enough for AP essays (although I did feel hampered being limited to intuitive guess-and-check to fix iffy sentences, and it seriously limited my ability to do the language analysis on the AP English Language and Composition exam - multiple choice was fine, but my analysis in my essays was mediocre at best - brought my score down to a 4 and I was happy to get it).  But what it *wasn't* good enough for was the PSAT.  My year was the first year they had a writing portion, chock-full of grammar usage questions, and my "does it sound right?" intuitive-only knowledge was simply not at the same level as my math and verbal knowledge, and that brought my score down.  I missed making National Merit Semi-Finalist over it (one bloody point!). 

 

But more important than scoring low on the PSAT is *why* I scored low on the PSAT - my intuitive-only grammar skills were much weaker than my formal-and-intuitive math skills and I knew it and disliked how that limited me.  Because if I didn't intuitively see the answer, there wasn't anything else I could do - I was stuck.  And even when I knew the answer, I didn't know *why* it was correct - only that it was.  It's extremely frustrating to stare at an iffy sentence, going back and forth between all the choices I could think of to fix it and have them all sound wrong - to be forced to re-phrase the sentence entirely because my intuitive knowledge of that grammatical structure is lacking and I have no way to correct it, because I don't even know how to describe what it is I'm not getting.  I just don't have the language or concepts to go with my intuitive knowledge.

 

The way I look at it, formal grammar knowledge and being able to diagram sentences - that's equivalent to knowing how to add/subtract/multiply/divide and what it means - procedural and conceptual knowledge.  Give me 2300/54, give me (a^3+a^2 +3a +6)*(a+4) - I know just what to do and why.  Being able to apply that formal knowledge to word problems and math problems in daily life - that's like using your grammar knowledge to analyze and explain what a sentence means and to construct sentences that say just what you want and you know just how you did it.  It combines intuitive and formal knowledge, so that you both *feel* the rightness or wrongness, and also are able to formally analyze and explain what goes into that rightness or wrongness. 

 

Trying to analyze what makes this sentence good and that sentence mediocre - and what to do to turn the mediocre sentence into a good one - when all you have is intuitive knowledge?  It's like trying to do word problems with a basic knowledge of what the add/sub/mult/div signs mean combined with an intuitive knowledge of the addition and multiplication tables - if you see 4 and 6, you know it's probably 10 or 24, and you can usually figure out which it is in a given problem.  But sometimes the answer is 2 or 1.5 - and while you know it's not 10 or 24 (and you could rewrite the problem into one that *does* have an answer of 10 or 24), you have no tools to figure out what the answer actually *is*.

[KeriJ]

WRT reading good literature is enough to pick up proper sentence structure and do well on standardized tests - not in my experience. I got very little grammar as a kid - basically the eight parts of speech in elementary and that's it. I read a ton and did pick up a lot of intuitive knowledge of grammar, and generally wrote well enough by the "does it sound right?" method. And that was fine for the state tests, and mostly good enough for AP essays (although I did feel hampered being limited to intuitive guess-and-check to fix iffy sentences, and it seriously limited my ability to do the language analysis on the AP English Language and Composition exam - multiple choice was fine, but my analysis in my essays was mediocre at best - brought my score down to a 4 and I was happy to get it). But what it *wasn't* good enough for was the PSAT. My year was the first year they had a writing portion, chock-full of grammar usage questions, and my "does it sound right?" intuitive-only knowledge was simply not at the same level as my math and verbal knowledge, and that brought my score down. I missed making National Merit Semi-Finalist over it (one bloody point!).

 

But more important than scoring low on the PSAT is *why* I scored low on the PSAT - my intuitive-only grammar skills were much weaker than my formal-and-intuitive math skills and I knew it and disliked how that limited me. Because if I didn't intuitively see the answer, there wasn't anything else I could do - I was stuck. And even when I knew the answer, I didn't know *why* it was correct - only that it was. It's extremely frustrating to stare at an iffy sentence, going back and forth between all the choices I could think of to fix it and have them all sound wrong - to be forced to re-phrase the sentence entirely because my intuitive knowledge of that grammatical structure is lacking and I have no way to correct it, because I don't even know how to describe what it is I'm not getting. I just don't have the language or concepts to go with my intuitive knowledge.

 

The way I look at it, formal grammar knowledge and being able to diagram sentences - that's equivalent to knowing how to add/subtract/multiply/divide and what it means - procedural and conceptual knowledge. Give me 2300/54, give me (a^3+a^2 +3a +6)*(a+4) - I know just what to do and why. Being able to apply that formal knowledge to word problems and math problems in daily life - that's like using your grammar knowledge to analyze and explain what a sentence means and to construct sentences that say just what you want and you know just how you did it. It combines intuitive and formal knowledge, so that you both *feel* the rightness or wrongness, and also are able to formally analyze and explain what goes into that rightness or wrongness.

 

Trying to analyze what makes this sentence good and that sentence mediocre - and what to do to turn the mediocre sentence into a good one - when all you have is intuitive knowledge? It's like trying to do word problems with a basic knowledge of what the add/sub/mult/div signs mean combined with an intuitive knowledge of the addition and multiplication tables - if you see 4 and 6, you know it's probably 10 or 24, and you can usually figure out which it is in a given problem. But sometimes the answer is 2 or 1.5 - and while you know it's not 10 or 24 (and you could rewrite the problem into one that *does* have an answer of 10 or 24), you have no tools to figure out what the answer actually *is*.

Excellent thoughts.

[Insertcreativenamehere]

I think grammar helps when learning a foreign language, editing, and writing with style and grace.

This is a big part of it. I was not explicitly taught much grammar in school but I internalized enough through reading to be a decent writer and earn a master's degree at a fairly prestigious university.

 

I loved learning languages and had minors in both Spanish and French in college, but I hit a wall in terms of fluency because of my lack of grammar instruction in English. In our native language, we know when something doesn't sound quite right, even if we don't know why. When I studied other languages, I got stuck on grammar points like direct and indirect objects. I had never learned what they were in English even though I was an decent speaker and writer, so I couldn't understand them in another language either. 

Edited October 8, 2016 by poikar

[shawthorne44]

I can totally relate to forty-two.  Some people can pick up grammar through exposure.   I have a STEM brain.  Even though I've read a great deal, including quality literature.  For example, in high school I decided that a life goal would be to read EVERY classic.   I am still hampered by the huge gap in my grammar education.   I had none between nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs in early elementary and diagramming Junior Year of high school.  But diagramming doesn't tell you when to use a semicolon or when to use lie/lay or effect/affect.   

 

I'm reading WTM ed.4.   I thought the answer to "Why early grammar instruction?" was a revelation.   She said you teach the mechanics of writing in the first four years, so that in the next four years when they are learning to get their thoughts down on paper, they don't have to stop and wonder about the mechanics, and lose their train of thought.    That was so important I paused the TV and read it to my husband.   

 

With editing, I can sound educated.   But, at work we frequently have group skype converations with messaging.  Sometimes my messages make me twitch when I look back at them.  I even usually edit my messages, but something in the conversation flow, I don't.  

 

[bethben]

Good points to all of you. Now I'm wondering if I should continue with rod and staff 6 for my 6th grader even when he's getting brief grammar instruction in his writing class.

 

 

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[Slache]

I wish I had had grammar instruction. I don't even know to use commas properly. That wheelbarrow thread made me feel like an absolute idiot. Teach your children grammar so they don't feel like fools when they grow up.

[HS Mom in NC]

Most Americans today are being exposed to poor grammar and many aren't aware of it.  They don't use reflexive pronouns correctly, they don't use adverbs correctly, subject verb agreement is getting worse overall, and most people don't have a clue when it comes to subjective and objective cases.

Commonly misused: I'm just going to be me.     Correctly used: I'm just going to be myself.

Commonly misused: She did good on the test.  Correctly used: She did well on the test.
Commonly misused: There's lots of them.          Correctly used: There are lots of them.

Commonly misused: Me and Tyler are going.     Correctly used: Tyler and I are going.

It's so bad here my adult kids intentionally use poorer grammar sometimes to blend in.  It irritates me.
 

[JoJosMom]

Most Americans today are being exposed to poor grammar and many aren't aware of it.  They don't use reflexive pronouns correctly, they don't use adverbs correctly, subject verb agreement is getting worse overall, and most people don't have a clue when it comes to subjective and objective cases.

 

Commonly misused: I'm just going to be me.     Correctly used: I'm just going to be myself.

Commonly misused: She did good on the test.  Correctly used: She did well on the test.

Commonly misused: There's lots of them.          Correctly used: There are lots of them.

Commonly misused: Me and Tyler are going.     Correctly used: Tyler and I are going.

 

It's so bad here my adult kids intentionally use poorer grammar sometimes to blend in.  It irritates me.

 

 

But pointing this out is considered to be elitist, because "language changes." :001_rolleyes:

[Crimson Wife]

 If you read good literature, you'll get that anyway correct?

 

Sadly, no.

 

My youngest brother grew up during the "whole language" fad and never formally studied grammar. He is a strong reader and managed to get a high verbal SAT score (>700) but his writing was atrocious. When he was a senior in college, he asked me for feedback on a draft of his honors thesis. Now one would expect a certain number of grammatical errors in a rough draft but he had so many that I could barely understand what he was trying to say. He knew that what he'd written didn't "sound right" but he was unable to fix the problems.

 

I wound up having to spend an entire evening giving him a crash course on grammar. When I'd finished, he thanked me and said that he wish he'd learned it in middle school as I had.

 

Do your kids a favor and teach them grammar. It doesn't have to be Rod & Staff. In fact, I think applied grammar like Don Killgallon's sentence composing books are the most useful in terms of improving a student's writing.

Edited October 9, 2016 by Crimson Wife

[IsabelC]

Most Americans today are being exposed to poor grammar and many aren't aware of it.  They don't use reflexive pronouns correctly, they don't use adverbs correctly, subject verb agreement is getting worse overall, and most people don't have a clue when it comes to subjective and objective cases.

 

Commonly misused: I'm just going to be me.     Correctly used: I'm just going to be myself.

Commonly misused: She did good on the test.  Correctly used: She did well on the test.

Commonly misused: There's lots of them.          Correctly used: There are lots of them.

Commonly misused: Me and Tyler are going.     Correctly used: Tyler and I are going.

 

It's so bad here my adult kids intentionally use poorer grammar sometimes to blend in.  It irritates me.

 

 

I find that one irritating. It's probably one of my Top Ten Things to Nag the Children About at the moment.

But I just tell them to think what they'd say if it were just them.  I.e. you wouldn't say "me is going", so you don't say "Me and Tyler are going..."  Conversely when they say "Grandma gave an apple to Tyler and I", I will remind them that  this can't be correct, because you'd never say "Grandma gave an apple to I".  So it's pretty easy to coach them in the more correct usages without explicitly teaching the relevant terminology.

 

 

Also, grammar seems to be one of those subjects that takes longer if you start earlier.  I had no trouble learning formal grammar in one term of 7th grade, even though I had never encountered it in previous grades (although as a serious bookworm, I had a good intuitive grasp), so I figure why spend years teaching a child something they can learn in weeks when they're older. (E.g. why spend about 10 weeks drilling a 5yo about what a noun is, when you can spend 10 seconds telling her the same thing when she's 12?)

 

Also I am still unable to diagram a sentence (well tbh I haven't ever tried, so who knows, maybe I could), but I had no trouble getting a first class honors degree based on my writing skills.  I'm not saying that it's bad to teach grammar, diagramming or anything; of course these things will have some value.  But for me, with a couple of kids who really struggle with more essential and basic things, it's a no brainer to skip some of the merely 'nice-to-have' subjects.

Edited October 9, 2016 by IsabelC

[Ms.Ivy]

"The War Against Grammar" by David Mulroy is worth reading for this topic.

[nobeatenpath]

Pure anecdote but - the only exposure I ever had to 'grammar' as a discrete subject was a six week course aged 12 that I hated. Loathed. We all loathed. And learned nothing.

 

I am a professional editor. People pay me to fix their writing and bring it up to a standard to be published professionally. I do occasionally have problems defining some terms (explaining a split infinitive to my husband, for example ...) but for many years people seem to be happy with my assessment of their writing. And most of that is from reading voraciously and writing a lot.

 

However I am definitely not a "math-brain"/"STEM-brain" person. My son is more of the 'tell me the rule so I know what I have to do' type of person so we are doing some grammar work because otherwise he just doesn't pick it up.

[eternalsummer]

the way different groups of people speak the language is not correct or incorrect

 

linguistics/grammar of everyday speech is descriptive, not prescriptive

 

thinking otherwise is not elitist - it's just wrong.

[lulalu]

Our family experience-

I was taught grammar and learned it well. My dh had little grammar due to switching schools four times and never learned it well. As we have learned several languages as adults I have had the much easier time at it. My husband needed me to go through English grammar with him to help him better understand the grammar of other languages.

 

Now this is pesrning language as an adult totally different for my ds as a young child.

 

However, my idea of education is to give the foundation so adult learning can be easier. You never know what the future holds. My husband's family never would have imagined the life he has now never, and they have said so.

 

I am planning grammar to be less formal and rigid though then say Rod and Staff, but that is because we naturally have conversations all the time about the languages we know as a family (wouldn't say I am an expert at these languages lol) but I think translation work shows mastery of language in the same way doing a r&s chapter would.

 

So depending on your family's dynamic of how often formal language is talked about might depend how many years a grammar course is needed, but I personally see more benefits to several good years with a good program as a foundation to adult learning than to not. And I recommend a good stretch of the brain in learning a non latin based language.

[Mergath]

But pointing this out is considered to be elitist, because "language changes." :001_rolleyes:

 

It does, though. It's common for people to think, "The way my cultural group speaks my language at this moment in time is the only correct way forever," but it's a very narrow view of language.

 

Obviously I'm not anti-grammar, as we're using MCT. ;) But I do try to be open-minded about this kind of thing.

[Guest]

TANAQUI

 

 

[Guest]

But pointing this out is considered to be elitist, because "language changes." :001_rolleyes:

 

Dost thou posit language never changes? :hat:

[Guest]

I am wondering what is the point of teaching grammar? I have put two children through rod and staff English and both of them can diagram sentences with little problem. They know grammar. But what's the point? I am questioning it for my last child. She does IEW so we're constantly talking about verbs and adverbs and proper sentences structure. And you get to any standardized test and all they care about it proper sentence structure. If you read good literature, you'll get that anyway correct? So why teach grammar?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I think that with some people, grammar instruction is sufficient when they learn the labels for what they already know.

 

Otherwise, yes some people need more explicit instruction, to be able to write great big good well.

 

What people lose sight of is that grammar is one thing we use for communication. That is, the entire reason it exists as a concept is to facilitate communication.

 

Think of it like the individual skills involved in cooking. Sometimes, it's OK to open a can of chili and just eat it alone in your kitchen. Sometimes you'll need to know how to finely dice, perfectly sear, and caramelize without burning. Not because anyone that does not cook like you cook is bad at cooking, but so that you can make what you set out to make.

[8filltheheart]

What drives me crazy is that my son now uses poor grammar all of the time. He is surrounded by people at work who speak using "me" as a subject. Huge pet peeve.

[kbutton]

I think conceptual grammar is an excellent thinking skill. I had been mostly taught grammar as a list of rules (probably not intentionally--it was a learning style thing, and I managed to do well enough that people thought I understood grammar). Being exposed to conceptual grammar was amazing for my brain. It felt so much better to know the why. Until that point, my best guess at the why was to try to locate some rule or trick. The why had been there with the rules, but the rules and "tricks" were overemphasized at the expense of relationships between parts of speech, parts of the sentence, phrases, and clauses. One of my favorite things about teaching grammar to my kids is watching them realize that prepositional phrases function as modifiers. It's magic, and the fun just takes off from there.

 

My college grammar teacher used to do seminars for professors and students in non-writing/English majors, and she said she could straighten out the majority of most people's grammar errors with just a few conceptual fixes to their understanding. Most of those fixes were for very early grammar concepts that just aren't always taught well. 

 

Mechanics on the other hand? The rules that aren't as conceptual are very frustrating, and it's even worse when one source does not agree with another. Long live style guides for that! For people who can't seem to internalize those rules, I think we need to emphasize resourceful ways of finding and fixing errors over memorization.

 

Both of my kids (and some of my friends' kids that do school stuff with mine) have language quirks, and grammar can help sort those out. One thing we do to work on that is to turn words into other parts of speech to help them see relationships and learn "more" words at one time. Some kids with language glitches struggle to identify different forms of the same verb as well. They file them in their brain as separate words until they get a grasp of how verbs change, and that holds them back with reading, writing, and vocabulary. In the case of the kids I work with (mine and others), they have very, very high verbal IQ's, but their other language scores are a mix of super high to low average. Many things can glitch up language processing, and I think formal instruction can sometimes help that.

 

 

[Crimson Wife]

the way different groups of people speak the language is not correct or incorrect

 

linguistics/grammar of everyday speech is descriptive, not prescriptive

 

thinking otherwise is not elitist - it's just wrong.

 

In formal academic settings, it will be expected that the student uses Standard American/British/etc. English. So while it is true from a linguistics standpoint that non-mainstream dialects are not "incorrect", they will be seen as such in formal academic writing. The speaker of a non-mainstream dialect needs to be proficient in "code-switching".

[HS Mom in NC]

Remember that there's a difference between using poor grammar to blend in socially (if you're in a social circle that condemns proper grammar usage) as the situation calls for it and using poor grammar because that's all you know.  No one should be in an academic environment where they're denied the opportunity to learn proper grammar usage for all the possible future situations that might call for it-that's professional malpractice. Everyone should have the ability to switch back and forth as they see fit.

[IsabelC]

Yes, I agree. We do need to draw a distinction between how things ought to be and how things actually are. In an ideal world, nobody would be judged on the way they speak or write; we'd simply all do our best to communicate and understand one another.  But in the real world, we are inevitably going to be judged.  All other things being equal, the job applicant whose CV or letter has incorrect/alternative grammar or spelling isn't going to get the job, and the person who speaks a certain way is going to be perceived as less intelligent and less educated. So our kids need to be able to speak and write 'properly', even if they don't choose to do so at all times.

Edited October 10, 2016 by IsabelC

[Bluegoat]

Understanding grammar helps us to understand and use language.  It is like tools in a mechanic's toolbox, or different techniques an artist migt use.  In order to use these tools and techniques, you first have to understand the principles.

 

That being said - what is necessary in terms of specific study of grammar is not so clear.  There is a tendency among some to think diagramming is the be-all and end-all which is, IMO, completely false.  It was a technique used for a relatively short time and in a limited geographical range - there are other ways to do it.  And in the past, quite a lot of English language speakers have learned their formal grammar mostly through study of other languages, while practicing English language skills while actually writing.

[Guest]

Well whatever works for other people, I'm not going to tell my kids they need to learn grammar because some people will look down on them if they do not.

[elegantlion]

As a college student, I am seeing how little or poor grammar instruction is holding back students. I'm in two foreign language classes and we're spending more time working on grammar conceptual knowledge that should have transferred from English grammar instruction, but the students haven't had good grammar instruction, if any. 

 

I think that grammar is kind of like math - like it or not as adults we use it all the time. How far one needs to study may depend upon life and career goals, for instance I will never learn calculus. I'm of an age when we covered grammar a lot in school, and there is so much I know but could not explain all the rules that apply. 

 

[LEK]

From my own personal experience I was never taught grammar at school, clearly I was in the generation where it was decided we would pick it up through language and reading, I did not (and neither did my husband). I spent my first year of uni teaching myself the relevant grammar so that I could get good grades on my assignments (science degree) and then had to learn even more grammar when I started my masters degree (arts, different style of writing). Each assignment was way more difficult and time consuming than it should have and it was not uncommon for me to spend more time on the grammar of the composition than the research and actual writing. A solid foundation in grammar would have allowed me to focus on the assignment rather than remedial grammar and I would have had much better grades overall. My husband, to this day, has absolutely 0 grammar knowledge despite having a degree and postgraduate certificate. He can not write even a single cohesive paragraph to save himself let alone an entire composition; not only was he never taught even the most basic grammar but it was assumed they would pick up writing skills naturally and "writing" was never taught explicitly. Huge fail. We have both decided, due to our experiences in higher education, that writing and grammar skills are essential and need to be explicitly taught.

[sbgrace]

I did some pretty involved research on this a couple of years ago, though admittedly I used resources from college teacher libraries and maybe they were biased? Typical grammar instruction, like diagramming, doesn't appear to directly translate to better writing in the research I did.

 

What I'm going to call applied grammar--such as tearing apart and reconstructing sentences that employ different structures using grammar--such as turning an adjective clause into a participial phrase, sentence combining work, and the like does seem to translate to better writing. I think learning editing things like punctuation, capitalizing and subject/verb agreement if not natural to a child is also useful in writing.

 

It's hard to find grammar programs that do more of the applied grammar.

 

FWIW, I'm doing almost entirely applied grammar (though using correct grammar terms) and editing practice with one of mine.

 

The other is doing more formal grammar along with the applied. I did this initially because his math brain doesn't seem to naturally grasp language usage as well as his twin. Also, he works quicker than his twin by a lot, and I thought having done the formal stuff just in case it helps in him testing or something someday is worth the bit of time it takes him/us to do CLE LA daily.

 

I will say that grammar instruction can make discussing what works and doesn't in writing a little more straightforward. That's why I make sure I teach correct grammar terms along with the applied grammar instruction with my son who isn't doing formal grammar.

[Bluegoat]

As a college student, I am seeing how little or poor grammar instruction is holding back students. I'm in two foreign language classes and we're spending more time working on grammar conceptual knowledge that should have transferred from English grammar instruction, but the students haven't had good grammar instruction, if any. 

 

I think that grammar is kind of like math - like it or not as adults we use it all the time. How far one needs to study may depend upon life and career goals, for instance I will never learn calculus. I'm of an age when we covered grammar a lot in school, and there is so much I know but could not explain all the rules that apply. 

 

I wonder though ow much of this would also be different if they were expecting ps kids to learn at least one other language to a useful level.

[Critterfixer]

We study grammar for the same reason we study Latin. It's cool and leads down interesting roads. Grammar is so much more than just knowing how to find a preposition phrase or diagram a complex verbal construction standing in for a subject. Grammar is almost like learning how to paint. Like practicing the brush strokes that are part of creating a work of art. So we do it because we like painting with words and knowing the way to talk about that. Even garden variety punctuation can be absolutely involved in creating a writer's style.

Is it hard? Sometimes.

It it tedious? Yes, often.

Is it rewarding? You bet.

 

That's how I see it.

 

[Ms.Ivy]

David Mulroy makes the point that grammar instruction helps with better reading, not just writing.

 

ETA: I think if you already know a second language you already pick up on the ideas and logic that grammar instruction would teach. Grammar as a separate subject can be redundant for some families. Just my observation.

Edited October 11, 2016 by Ms.Ivy

[Crimson Wife]

 

There is a tendency among some to think diagramming is the be-all and end-all which is, IMO, completely false.  It was a technique used for a relatively short time and in a limited geographical range - there are other ways to do it. 

 

There are indeed other ways to do it, some better than others.

 

Michael Clay Thompson's 4-level analysis is a good alternative IMHO.

 

The "phrase structure trees" that I'm having to do for my "Language Science" course, however, are highly annoying. I can't tell you how many times I've said to myself this semester when drawing the trees, "This would be SOOOOOO much easier to do as a Reed-Kellogg diagram!"

[Mrs.Wilson]

Is it necessary to teach your children to diagram sentences?  I never understood it as a child.

[HS Mom in NC]

Few people have diagrammed complex sentences.  Until you can diagram complex sentences you can't really use diagramming as a diagnostic tool for awkward phrasing in really complex sentences. You also can't use it as a tool to study well constructed complex sentences.  I have no idea why so many schools will teach diagramming simple sentences if they're not going to follow through and teach it at higher levels.  Of course, it's one of many tools a person a can use and should be part of a person's big bag of tricks, but few people have been given the opportunity. Notice the theme there?  It's one thing to choose a particular route from many options.  It's another thing entirely to be forced onto the only route you've ever known because you're unaware of the other routes.   The latter is a crappy thing to do to a person.

There was a recent thread on diagramming if someone wants to look it up.

[ElizaG]

There's a school of thought that holds that written English is a "different language" from spoken English.   The first place I came across this idea was in The Well-Trained Mind, though I'm pretty sure that SWB isn't the one who came up with it.  It doesn't make much sense to me, but for those who believe this, it follows naturally that grammar should be taught explicitly as the foundation for composition. 

 

All of the evidence I've come across -- going back centuries -- suggests that grammar is picked up orally, from the child's environment.  This might explain why some people in this thread have had difficulties with English grammar, despite having read a lot of classics.   It seems as if hearing might be much more important than reading.   So I'd be curious to know what sort of spoken, recorded, and broadcast English these posters were exposed to on a regular basis.

[ElizaG]

Also wanted to recommend Kenneth Cmiel's book, Democratic Eloquence:  The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America. 

 

The situation he describes is different from the "descriptivist vs. prescriptivist" quarrel as we'd understand it today.   One the one hand, there were the classical education types, who wanted to continue the old-world approach of taking their standards of English from the usage of the "best speakers and authors."   On the other hand, there were the populists such as Noah Webster, who thought it more egalitarian to establish rules representing a "middling style" (not too rustic, not too hoity-toity), and to require everyone to follow them.

 

The populists pretty much won, which is why Americans spell the way they do.  Come to think of it, maybe that's also where this "two different languages" idea came from?   It's possible that the set of standards they chose might not have borne much resemble to anyone's actual everyday habits.

 

And it's ironic that prescriptivism -- which is now often considered elitist or discriminatory -- was originally the "progressive" option. 

[Crimson Wife]

 

All of the evidence I've come across -- going back centuries -- suggests that grammar is picked up orally, from the child's environment.  This might explain why some people in this thread have had difficulties with English grammar, despite having read a lot of classics.   It seems as if hearing might be much more important than reading.   So I'd be curious to know what sort of spoken, recorded, and broadcast English these posters were exposed to on a regular basis.

 

My brother, who struggled with his writing despite being a strong reader, grew up with highly educated parents in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. He heard the Standard American English dialect in terms of syntax, though the pronunciation would've been a bit different from SAE since it was New England.

 

The problem was not with the way he spoke but with his attempts at getting his thoughts down on paper in a comprehensible way.

 

[AMJ]

We study grammar for the same reason we study Latin. It's cool and leads down interesting roads. Grammar is so much more than just knowing how to find a preposition phrase or diagram a complex verbal construction standing in for a subject. Grammar is almost like learning how to paint. Like practicing the brush strokes that are part of creating a work of art. So we do it because we like painting with words and knowing the way to talk about that. Even garden variety punctuation can be absolutely involved in creating a writer's style.

Is it hard? Sometimes.

It it tedious? Yes, often.

Is it rewarding? You bet.

 

That's how I see it.

 

 

THIS!   :iagree:    I would have liked this post had I any likes left.  

 

 

 

Grammar is key to the language.  Different languages have different grammars.  If you understand grammar concepts it makes learning languages easier.

 

How one communicates has a strong impact on their professional lives, too, so knowing proper grammar and when to use it are good life skills to have.

 

 

And in Texas the most basic answer to "why study/teach grammar" is:  It's one of the 5 required topics for homeschool.

[AMJ]

There are indeed other ways to do it, some better than others.

 

Michael Clay Thompson's 4-level analysis is a good alternative IMHO.

 

The "phrase structure trees" that I'm having to do for my "Language Science" course, however, are highly annoying. I can't tell you how many times I've said to myself this semester when drawing the trees, "This would be SOOOOOO much easier to do as a Reed-Kellogg diagram!"

 

 

We love MCTLA here!

 

And we really appreciate covering the bulk of the year's grammar in the first few weeks and having only a sentence a day to analyze for the rest of the school year.

[Crimson Wife]

We love MCTLA here!

 

And we really appreciate covering the bulk of the year's grammar in the first few weeks and having only a sentence a day to analyze for the rest of the school year.

 

An advantage that both traditional Reed-Kellogg diagrams and "phrase structure" trees have over MCT's 4-level analysis is that the sentence structure is visually apparent. I can very easily see which part of the sentence the prepositional phrase is modifying (subject, predicate, direct object, etc.) by its placement on the diagram/tree. This is why I require my kids to diagram the sentence after completing the 4 level analysis.

[mamiof5]

WRT reading good literature is enough to pick up proper sentence structure and do well on standardized tests - not in my experience. I got very little grammar as a kid - basically the eight parts of speech in elementary and that's it. I read a ton and did pick up a lot of intuitive knowledge of grammar, and generally wrote well enough by the "does it sound right?" method. And that was fine for the state tests, and mostly good enough for AP essays (although I did feel hampered being limited to intuitive guess-and-check to fix iffy sentences, and it seriously limited my ability to do the language analysis on the AP English Language and Composition exam - multiple choice was fine, but my analysis in my essays was mediocre at best - brought my score down to a 4 and I was happy to get it). But what it *wasn't* good enough for was the PSAT. My year was the first year they had a writing portion, chock-full of grammar usage questions, and my "does it sound right?" intuitive-only knowledge was simply not at the same level as my math and verbal knowledge, and that brought my score down. I missed making National Merit Semi-Finalist over it (one bloody point!).

 

But more important than scoring low on the PSAT is *why* I scored low on the PSAT - my intuitive-only grammar skills were much weaker than my formal-and-intuitive math skills and I knew it and disliked how that limited me. Because if I didn't intuitively see the answer, there wasn't anything else I could do - I was stuck. And even when I knew the answer, I didn't know *why* it was correct - only that it was. It's extremely frustrating to stare at an iffy sentence, going back and forth between all the choices I could think of to fix it and have them all sound wrong - to be forced to re-phrase the sentence entirely because my intuitive knowledge of that grammatical structure is lacking and I have no way to correct it, because I don't even know how to describe what it is I'm not getting. I just don't have the language or concepts to go with my intuitive knowledge.

 

The way I look at it, formal grammar knowledge and being able to diagram sentences - that's equivalent to knowing how to add/subtract/multiply/divide and what it means - procedural and conceptual knowledge. Give me 2300/54, give me (a^3+a^2 +3a +6)*(a+4) - I know just what to do and why. Being able to apply that formal knowledge to word problems and math problems in daily life - that's like using your grammar knowledge to analyze and explain what a sentence means and to construct sentences that say just what you want and you know just how you did it. It combines intuitive and formal knowledge, so that you both *feel* the rightness or wrongness, and also are able to formally analyze and explain what goes into that rightness or wrongness.

 

Trying to analyze what makes this sentence good and that sentence mediocre - and what to do to turn the mediocre sentence into a good one - when all you have is intuitive knowledge? It's like trying to do word problems with a basic knowledge of what the add/sub/mult/div signs mean combined with an intuitive knowledge of the addition and multiplication tables - if you see 4 and 6, you know it's probably 10 or 24, and you can usually figure out which it is in a given problem. But sometimes the answer is 2 or 1.5 - and while you know it's not 10 or 24 (and you could rewrite the problem into one that *does* have an answer of 10 or 24), you have no tools to figure out what the answer actually *is*.

As Rod and Staff gets harder I've been questioning the same, why teach it?

 

The above post answered it for me :)

[Alicia64]

Haven't read all the responses, but reading good lit alone won't do it. I grew up w/ terrible holes in my grammar and I became a writer. I had the creative part down, but the grammar part was a true mess. I'm still learning w/ my boys today.

 

If you could read a truly poor sentence/paragraph, you'd go, "oh." You're just used to a culture that is awash in good writing, good editors, good publishers etc. (Although not-so-great writing is getting front-and-center w/ blogs.)

 

I tell my kids that grammar is to writing what driving rules are to the road. Without good grammar, our words would crash into each other and go off the sides of cliffs. And the reader would have a heck of a time understanding the book.

 

The grammar program we've loved:  CreateBetterWriters.com by David Dye. Not anal, super easy to follow. I have my kids do a page or two a day and call it good. Their grammar is great now -- they're 13 -- with no tears or annoyance.

 

Yes, at times -- like yesterday -- I think, "Who CARES if it's an intransitive verb versus a transitive verb?! Really, who gives a hoot? But most of the stuff in David's workbooks are usable on a practical basis.

 

Alley

[bethben]

What about the "Andrew Pudewa" way of teaching grammar?  His suggestion is to teach grammar in context.  IEW which I have used for years does this well.  You look to put in a strong verb for example.  In order to find a verb, you have to know what it is.  The "dress ups" IEW uses lends itself easily to teaching grammar in context of writing.  Then, when the child hits 6th/7th grade, teach them grammar which will take care of the rest of English grammar because you are having to learn grammar in the context of learning a different language.  

[Critterfixer]

Dressing up sentences would not go far enough for me. I don't want to put clothes on basic bones. I want to make those bones walk around and dance. I've got to go deeper and wider to get there.

 

 

If you could read a truly poor sentence/paragraph, you'd go, "oh." You're just used to a culture that is awash in good writing, good editors, good publishers etc. (Although not-so-great writing is getting front-and-center w/ blogs.)

 

I just had to comment on this. Good editing can be hard to come by. It's easy enough to run a grammar check with a program and watch it make errors out of perfectly good sentences. And editing often does not go far enough in telling a writer what they could be doing to make their writing stronger. The writer has to learn to do this. He has to see where his grammar actually reflects poor thinking about the subject. Or if he has not fully visualized his scene so that he can paint that image for the reader. There is far more to grammar than just parts of speech and their basic usage, IMO. There's a world of grammar out there that is beautiful, bright and amazing in terms of creating style that I never knew, and am discovering. Heady stuff for me, actually.

Edited October 16, 2016 by Critterfixer