Wednesday, June 22, 2005
On Language 6/21: Learning language by teaching English 101
A language lover’s crash course in English
Chicago Tribune, June 21, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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I taught English 101 for the first time this past semester. Here are six things I learned on the other side of the desk at my alma mater, Calvin College, a liberal arts school in Grand Rapids, Mich.:
1. It only takes a few weeks to be able to identify each student’s individual writing voice. Word choice, sentence length, comma use, vocabulary range and choice of topic all bear the fingerprint of the author. It helped that I had only 22 students, but I thought it would take all semester to recognize their distinct styles. When I could, I told them so, both to discourage plagiarism and to make the point that a discernible, seemingly audible voice can emerge when you put words on paper.
2. There’s no good way to talk about grammar to a generation that hasn’t been taught it. Anytime I diagrammed a sentence or talked about relative clauses, I felt I was speaking a foreign language. Luckily, grammar was just one of four things I graded in assignments, along with content, structure and style.
I could never go as far as former University of Illinois at Chicago dean Stanley Fish, who wrote recently in The New York Times that his freshman writing course focused entirely on sentence structure. He assigned students to invent a language of their own and explain its grammar in terms of tense, singulars and plurals, subjects and objects, and so on. But that’s not a writing class; that’s a linguistics class. On the other hand, I’m not convinced, as are some English teachers I talked to, that the relationship between knowing grammatical terms and writing well is remote.
...
My dad explained that the book title I mention is a case of a restrictive appositive. Learn something every day!
Response I received from reader Rene Muller:
I just read your article as published in the Chicago Tribune Tempo
section. I’m not trying to be a writer, but I graduated with a degree
in English and Rhetoric and volunteer as an editor for an online
newsletter (and, on a different topic that I wish more people had
pointed out to me in the course of my education: there is a massive
difference between the grammatical rules for academic
writing/literature, etc. and the grammatical rules for journalism).... I agree with your article a thousand times over. And I would like to relate to you my experience
with how I was taught grammar.I had a fierce grammarian for two semesters of English in high school.
He was well-known as strange, eccentric, and scary as hell to have for
a teacher. He made people cry. Often. I can’t say that I agreed with
that part, but it had something to do with my motivation to learn and
write down the grammar rules he lectured for the first 3 weeks of
class.That first semester with him - after we took notebooks full of notes
on tense, participles, gerunds, when to use commas, how to conjugate
lie and lay - encompassed only two assignments. The first assignment
was to read the classic text, Antigone, and write a paper with a
sentence limit on a specific and highly analytical topic that the
teacher dreamed up. I think the sentence limit was maybe 70. As a
result, the paper’s sentence structure was amazingly complicated for
every person’s paper. I knew that because we all had to read our
papers out loud, to the class, subject to the teacher’s critical wit.
That took half a semester. By the time the papers were being read, we
were all junior masters of compound-complex sentences.The second assignment for the second part of the semester was to
diagram every sentence in our paper. And the diagrams had to be
perfect with no slop because we had part of a letter grade taken off
for each mistake. Imagine! 70 sentences, each one the most complicated
sentence any of us had written. And now we had to figure out how each
word of each of those 70 monstrosities functioned in the sentence.
That’s what you call having grammar shoved down your throat.The point of this story is actually related to your article. Now, I’m
27. I’m out of school and in the work force. I’m not a writer or
editor by trade, but every time I don’t understand a sentence, a
phrase, a word usage, or which word to pick for a good sentence, guess
what I do? I diagram. I work with a woman who moved here from a
foreign country. She has an amazing grasp of the language, and she’s
only been here 5 years. Once in a while, she will come to me with
questions about how to phrase or punctuate her ideas in English. We
work in the field of law, so the writing is a bit more formal. We
figure out what she’s trying to say sometimes with a diagrammed
sentence. It’s the handiest thing because I don’t speak her native
language, and she had some diagramming in high school as well.So, the way I see it, the better you know how a word functions in a
sentence, the better structural choices you make in forming a sentence
and communicating a thought. And the the more freedom you have when
looking for a sentence structure. Especially in law where everyone is
held accountable for exactly what they say, it is very important to
communicate clearly and precisely. I think grammar is a tool. Like any
tool, you have a relationship with it, but you must know how it works.
You can choose to hone the tool with precision or you can choose to
ignore it completely. Or you play like e.e. cummings or Lewis Carrol.
I’m pretty sure a good writer knows the fundamentals of grammar before
he or she makes that choice.