I wanted to use, as my title, the line "She taught me how to use the comma splice," which was a comment that my friend and co-author Susie Day once got on a student evaluation form. Although this comment illustrates the risks involved in teaching grammatical concepts to composition students, I couldn't quite bend it to fit the main focus of my speech today. So I chose, instead, a more pedestrian title. I took this title from an advertising blurb for Professor Rei Noguchi's recent book Grammar and the Teaching of Writing (1991). I think the phrase "an uneasy partnership" accurately describes my perception of the situation that exists in many college and high school English departments throughout the country. Indeed, I've noticed that a number of the presentations at this conference are addressing the same issues about the link between grammatical knowledge and writing competence that I'm going to be discussing today.
My thesis is quite straightforward, perhaps even obvious: I contend that an important professional partnership does exist between teachers of grammar and teachers of writing, and that we need to value and strengthen this partnership, if at all possible. But that partnership is an uneasy one, to say the least. In fact, "uneasy" is probably too polite a term: "downright hostile" is often closer to the truth -- unfortunately. Professor Noguchi, who consciously adopts a moderate position on the question of how grammar instruction affects the teaching of writing, speaks of "the staunch cadre of pro-grammar instructors" and the "hard-line anti-grammar teachers." The terms he uses, staunch and hard-line, suggest the often polemical nature of the grammar controversy.
I think most of us here are familiar with the main points of the conflict. Those in the hard-line anti-grammar camp claim that research reveals little evidence that direct instruction in grammar has any positive effect on a person's ability to speak and write. They insist that skills learned from grammar textbooks and worksheets do not transfer to the messy business of composing a full essay. And they point out that the more time spent studying grammar as grammar, the less time spent writing; and the less time spent writing, the less improvement in the written product.
On the other side, the staunch pro-grammar instructors are convinced that studying grammar improves language use, especially in writing. They maintain that a knowledge of grammar makes the writer aware of the resources available for creating effective sentences and that it also provides the student and teacher with a common basis for recognizing and analyzing sentence problems and for learning to remedy them.
I'm sure that those of us who are here today recognize that this conflict is not about the basic goal of language instruction. Both sides agree that students can and should become more effective and flexible users of their language. The debate is over the best methods by which to achieve this goal. The most sensible and productive way to reconcile the pedagogical differences between the staunch grammarians and the hard-line compositionists -- and one that several presenters at this conference appear to be pursuing -- is to integrate grammar instruction with student reading and writing, to take the emphasis off formal grammar and put it on functional grammar. But that approach, simple and clear as it may seem, has not brought the two sides together.
A lot of English teachers continue to disregard -- or deny -- the distinction between "teaching grammar as an academic subject and teaching grammar as a tool for writing" (Noguchi 17). The fact is that grammar -- both as a description of language structures and as a standard of verbal etiquette -- still plays a big part in what many teachers, administrators, and parents consider to be basic literacy. Thus, in many schools and colleges across the country the teaching of formal grammar is still taken for granted. New teachers and graduate assistants are given a text like Warriner's (on the high school level) or Evergreen (on the college level) and told to teach it.
On the other side of the battlefield, many composition specialists, primarily at the university level, I think, have abandoned the attempt to teach any grammar at all. They focus, instead, on helping student writers to develop a unique voice and acquire a number of strategies for finding and organizing better content, and in doing so, they hope to foster an improved self image, a confidence and pride in the act of writing, a desire to make it perfect on every level. These teachers seek to avoid a crippling and useless preoccupation with grammar and error, in the belief that students can get it right readily enough when they genuinely have the motivation to do so and in the belief that repeated exposure to the written standard will enable students to acquire standard forms by some kind of linguistic osmosis (D'Eloia 373).
In other words, some teachers of English still teach formal grammar religiously, while other teachers of English avoid grammar like some form of flesh-eating bacteria. Any sense of forging a viable partnership between grammar and rhetoric, at least in the minds of these people, still seems a dim and distant goal, despite continuing efforts to integrate the two fields of study.
Now, obviously there are a number of reasons for this stand-off. The staunch pro-grammar advocates tend to believe that studying grammar contributed to their own ability to use language effectively, and they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that the same will be true for their students. Besides, many of these people like to teach grammar, and publishing companies are more than willing to provide them with textbooks and workbooks in which explanations, exercises, and drills come conveniently packaged. I think we also have to acknowledge the role that standardized testing plays in affirming the inclination to teach formal grammar: it's a lot easier to score the multiple-choice items in the Test of Standard Written English than it is to evaluate an essay.
As for the hard-line anti-grammarians, they tend to fall into two groups: those who learned to write successfully without rigorous training in grammar and those who became frustrated when their attempts to teach formal grammar failed to produce significant writing improvement. Of this frustrated group, Professor Noguchi writes:
Given this situation, it is not surprising to hear angry voices from both sides of the divide. The underpaid, underappreciated composition specialists regard PhDs in literature as reluctant colleagues, ill inclined and ill suited to teach writing, whose materials, assignments, and methods seem designed to allow themselves to indulge in their own specialized literary pre-occupations. The threatened literature people look askance at research in composition and claim that writing is not an academic subject at all: "I'm sorry to have to say, " writes one full professor of literature, but "departments cannot justify hiring composition specialists as such. These persons cannot teach anything because they do not know anything" (Harmon 32).
In the past decade, composition specialists have begun to combat their relegation to the economic and intellectual lower classes, and we have seen a steady growth of graduate programs in composition and rhetoric, a proliferation of articles and book-length studies on the theory and practice of composition, and the development of workers' rights initiatives like the Wyoming Resolution. And while some of these developments have arisen as defensive maneuvers, as strategies to protect turf and rationalize self-interest, they also represent the politics of teaching writing. As James Slevin has pointed out, the field of rhetoric and composition has emerged in our own time as a form of educational and political reform (154). Composition specialists -- from Mina Shaughnessy, Ken Macrorie, and Richard Ohmann to James Berlin, Andrea Lunsford, and Mike Rose -- have consistently addressed questions of who gets to attend college, what happens to them, and how their writing can a make a difference for them, as well as what it means to acquire knowledge and change what is claimed to be known. The catch phrases about composition instruction with which we are all familiar -- writing as process, writing to learn, writing as a way of thinking, writing as a way of knowing -- reflect a concern with such matters as "access" and "empowerment" and the way that higher education is conducted in this country (Slevin 154).
And this is where the controversy about grammar comes in. Many composition specialists, I think, regard the teaching of grammar as a throwback to the kind of education they have been trying to reform. They also take suggestions about the use and value of grammar instruction as ideological positions that serve to undercut composition studies in the curricular politics of university English departments. Or, to put it another way, composition specialists are often on the defensive: like Rodney Dangerfield, they feel they don't get no respect. And who can argue with them? Almost always, it is composition that gets taught by teachers in the least privileged positions. Even at universities where rhetoric and composition is an accepted academic discipline, composition specialists often have to perform administrative tasks that deter them from pursuing the research and scholarship that will earn them tenure and promotion and the esteem of their colleagues. So when a comp specialist hears a comment like "These students can't write because they don't know grammar" or "All these students need is a good course in grammar, " she's likely to take such a remark as both an insult and a threat. She feels, quite rightly I think, that such simplistic attitudes about language and writing denigrate her professional standing. If writing is merely a craft that anyone with a Harbrace Handbook can teach, then there isn't any need for graduate courses in rhetorical theory or travel funds and release time to support research about the writing process. This feeling of professional insecurity, I believe, has contributed a great deal to the unyielding position that many composition experts take on the subject of grammar.
So where does this leave us? Well, for one thing, it leaves us in the cross-fire between composition and literature. If we want to improve the partnership between grammar instruction and the teaching of writing, then one of the most important things we can do is support efforts to improve the status of writing teachers and increase the respect accorded scholarship in rhetoric and composition. (By the way, I would make this recommendation to all of my colleagues, regardless of their academic specialties. I think it's disgraceful the way our profession continues to operate with attitudes and practices that debase the teaching of writing.) In addition, I think we need to insist that all English majors, both graduate and undergraduate, have training in rhetoric and language. I have no problem with requiring English majors to study grammar as an academic subject. I think they should have more than a casual knowledge of the theories of language and writing and should also know something about the teaching of writing. It's my observation that all English majors are potential teachers, even those who say they don't want to be. Too many graduate students, who have taken nothing but literature courses, wind up teaching three sections of freshman composition without any idea of where to start and how to proceed.
On a more practical level, I would suggest that if we want composition instructors to teach grammar as a tool for writing, then we need to supply them with efficient, effective procedures for doing so, as several of the presenters at this conference are clearly doing. We must work to develop a grammar for writers that is inductive, actively analytical, stimulating, and discovery-based. If students are going to write better sentences (which is what the controversy about grammar usually boils down to), they must write a lot of sentences -- not someone else's sentences but sentences of their own. We must remember that the chief limit of grammatical analysis is that it has no necessary connection to the synthetic process of writing. Observing grammatical patterns is not the same as constructing them. And constructing them is not the same as proofreading them. We diminish the partnership between grammar and writing instruction when we lose sight of this essential distinction (D'Eloia 389).
And finally, let me make one more suggestion. Let's all relax a little, lower our voices, and draw on the confidence that comes from doing valuable, important work. Teaching writing is important. The study of language, including grammar, is valuable. And with intelligence and persistence and an understanding of the conflicts involved, we can improve the partnership between grammar instruction and the teaching of writing. It's a goal worth pursuing.
Harmon, William. "Loneliness: Second Epistle to the Laodiceans." ADE Bulletin 66 (Winter 1980): 31-33.
Horner, Winifred. "Historical Introduction." Composition & Literature: -- Bridging the Gap. Ed. Winifred B. Horner. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1983. 1-8.
Miller, Richard E. "Composing English Studies: Towards a Social History of the Discipline." College Composition and Communication 45.2 (May 1994): 164-79.
Noguchi, Rei R. Grammar and the Teaching of Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1991.
Slevin, James F. "The Politics of the Profession." An Introduction to Composition Studies. Ed. Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 135-59.
Young, Art. "The 1981-82 Writing and Literature Survey: Courses and Programs." ADE Bulletin 73 (Winter 1982): 47-52.