Unabashed Notes on the "G-word": 
Grammar in the Classroom

John Horlivy
University School of Milwaukee
A paper presented at the Fifth Annual Conference of the NCTE Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar, August 12 & 13, 1994. Illinois State University, Normal, IL. 
[Editor's Note: The following is reprinted from CLASSROOMStoday (Winter 1994), a publication of the University School of Milwaukee. In giving his permission for reprinting, Mr. Horlivy commented: "I found 'Unabashed Notes' useful in showing our parents how generative methods of instruction in grammar and rhetoric relate directly to helping students write with increased sophistication and flexibility."] 

I have a startling price of "inside" information about the majority of today's teachers of English: they are embarrassed about something, about a particular body of knowledge that they wish would disappear but which swirls about them and tends to stick to them, like burrs tot heir cuffs and hems. They are so troubled by this annoyance that they are disinclined to talk about it among themselves, much less with their students, or with you, their students' parents.

I'm referring to what one wag has called "the g-word," the word which denotes the body of knowledge we can use to describe the manner in which these very sentences cohere and generate meaning. I am referring, of course, to the word "grammar."

In these paragraphs I will describe briefly how it happened that grammar fell so low in American schools. I will then move on to my primary goal: to demonstrate how grammar still holds an important position in USM's English curriculum by describing some of the positive effects teachers are achieving with instruction in syntax and traditional grammar.

Prior to the early 1960s, most students studied grammar using drill books. Then in 1963 a defining moment occurred in the English teaching profession. Richard Braddock et al. summarized and assessed studies on the effects of grammar instruction, concluding with this now-famous sentence:

A second researcher, George Hillocks, using sophisticated statistical meta-analysis techniques, concluded, similarly, that the study of traditional school grammar "has no effect on raising the quality of student writing" and that, taught with certain methodologies, "grammar and mechanics instruction has a deleterious effect on student writing." (248-49) It seemed to be all over for grammar instruction, a body of knowledge now effectively tainted by descriptors like "negligible," "harmful," and "deleterious." Teachers found the anti-grammar arguments persuasive and, as a consequence, placed increased emphasis upon teaching the writing process, achieving, all of us agree, widespread efficacious results. In the process, however, grammar suffered neglect in the classrooms.

Even though the teaching of traditional grammar on the national scene during the past thirty years has languished in pedagogical eclipse, it perdures in USM's Upper School, entering most students' lives during the proofreading stage of essay writing. Using the terminology of traditional grammar, students confer with their assigned English teachers or with English instructors in the Writing Lab about questions of standard English usage and stylistic effectiveness.

But some English instructors go one step further. They teach traditional grammar as an integral component of generative rhetoric, a pedagogical strategy devised by Francis Christensen for teaching sentence style. Although Christensen's rhetoric still enjoys scholarly attention, it is not widely used in classrooms -- mainly because no useful texts based upon its concepts are currently available. Those of us who use generative rhetoric devise our own materials.

Christensen observed that successful writers know -- consciously or unconsciously -- how to manipulate the central elements of a commonly-used sentence design called the cumulative sentence. This type of sentence consists of a main clause, which Christensen called the "base clause," to which the writer adds one or more non-restrictive modifiers, which he labeled "free modifiers" -- because they are somewhat free to move to various locations within a sentence. Constructing a sentence, Christensen suggested, can be viewed as an additive, or cumulative process.

USM juniors Sara Yagobian and Briana Doerr in a classroom exercise cooperatively wrote the following cumulative sentence, consciously placing three free modifiers immediately after the main clause, including within their sentence, as well, the vocabulary word-of-the-day. "coalesce":

By consciously practicing their skills in managing (or "playing") with syntactic structures, such as the two participial phrases and the absolute phrase in the sentence above, these writers found themselves placed in a circumstance designed to enhance their self-confidence as writers. They were invited to learn, discursively or intuitively, how effective, well-designed sentences are structured. In the sentence presented above, they demonstrated their syntactic skills by opening with a brief, simple statement of their basic idea (two students working together on a sentence) and following it with a series of free modifiers which add, successively and cumulatively, layers of new detail in developing effectively the main idea of the sentence.

One carefully crafted sentence does not an effective writer (or a team of writers) make, but the late Francis Christensen would, no doubt, have found merit in the sentence written by Sarah and Briana, for he believed that "[a] mature style will have a high frequency of free modifiers, especially in the final position." The students' sentence presents nine words in its base clause, but 18 words within the three free modifiers placed after that base clause. (Although we also teach other sentence designs -- including the simple sentence, the compound sentence, and the balanced sentence -- we give the more frequently-used cumulative sentence primary attention.)

The classroom methodology is simple. Each day the student is challenged to combine his or her knowledge of the daily vocabulary word in a sentence that includes a special structure or strategy of generative rhetoric. During a recent class period, Devanand Manoli '95 placed the word "swarthy" within a free appositive phrase and included several additional free modifiers to lend narrative panache to his sentence:

Erika Krause '95 combined the vocabulary word "aspersion" with three adverbial free modifiers that established the ingredients of a micro-narrative charged with dramatic irony: These two sentences are particularly well-crafted, especially when one considers that the writers had only a few minutes in which to write them.

Not every student achieves noteworthy success each day, but as the school year progresses, the sentences become more and more interesting because of their increased sophistication. It seems that the daily exercise constitutes a happy balance between creativity, on the one hand, and conscious application of sound rhetorical concepts, on the other. Although we introduce such novel terms as "levels of generality," "direction of modification," and "coordinate patterns of development," we still employ, of necessity, the terminology of traditional English grammar, and because of the salutary results we get from our students, we do so with relish and enthusiasm.

Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. 1963.Research in Written Composition. Champaign, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English.

Christensen, Francis. 1978. "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence," in Francis Christensen and Bonniejean Christensen, ed. Notes Toward a New Rhetoric. 2nd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

Hillocks, George, Jr. 1986. Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching. Urbana, Ill> ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills and the National Conference on Research in English.