Re: grammar

[Nick Carbone <nickc@english.umass.edu>]

These are always fun discussions, aren't they? I know there's some small
truth to charges that some people go through school and don't learn proper
usage, but my experience has been that the cases to which that truth
applies are really very few. Almost every one I talk to about usage--and
once people know I'm a writing teacher, it invariably comes up--has a
story about learning proper usage. I remember diagramming sentences in the
fifth grade. My daughter's in the third grade and she's learning to name
parts of sentences. I've been to schools in other districts and states and
this stuff gets taught. I know from working in the writing center at
Marlboro that students have errors pointed out to them all the time. 

I know from friends who teach in high-school and from discussions on
NCTE-TALK that high-school teachers address punctuation and usage. Which
brings me around to Eric's point. Teaching and learning are two different
things. For some reason this stuff is taught, but clearly not learned as
well as we imagine it should be. I think part of what happens is that we
don't teach enough writing that matters, writing where it really *really*
matters--intrinsically matters--to the writer that their prose is fine
tuned and usage error free. Part of it is too that we always imagine the
writing we see as the worst that's ever been produced by students.
Teachers and others who write fairly competently tsk tsk at others errors.

According to Hairston's study of managers and professionals outside
of academia ("Not All Errors are Created Equal", _College English, 43,
1981), some errors are more noticeable and costly (brung instead of
brought leaps out more severely than whoever where whomever is called for,
for example). Which is to say, that what gets counted as an error, is, as
Libby suggests, what gets noticed, a truth supported by Connors and
Lunsfords "Ma and Pa Kettle" piece (CCC, 39, 1988). That study measured
how frequently formal errors were marked by teachers, and along the way
offered an interesting comparison. Based on prior studies of error
frequency, students in the mid-eighties were only making something like .6
errors more per 100 words that students in the early 1900's. 

To me that means teachers for the past 75 years or so were part of
freshman classes that were about equal in terms of error frequency. This
is remarkable on two counts. 1) on average papers have gotten longer in
writing courses and 2) students are growing up with more competing
literacies. In the last 98 years we've gone from print to telegraph to
telephone to radio to movies to television to the Internet, each new
technology changing the relationship of all of us to the written word. 

Also, I wonder how much writing people need to do to keep rules in mind.
In high school I had advanced calculus, and in college some fairly
challenging math courses. But I haven't used any of that stuff since those
courses in anything like the way the teacher demanded. So too with most
people. Most people don't write with the kind of attention to detail asked
of them in school except in school. They lose practice and might go some
time between needing those skills. Or else they learn how to cope without
them, finding a friend who can proofread, going to a resume service for
help with their cover letters and so on.

Just how necessary, really, is it to be able to write well at the drop of
hat after all?

 Nick Carbone, Writing Instructor
Marlboro College
Marlboro, VT 05344
nickc@marlboro.edu, but coming to you via nickc@english.umass.edu