Grammar is language logic, which is not a right-or-wrong rationality but a guide to understanding what a sentence actually says as opposed to what the author meant the sentence to say. It also allows the writer to extend "Did I say what I intended to say?" to "Did I say something that surprised me?" or, more painfully, to "Did my grammatical contortions allow me to avoid saying something that is difficult but important to say?" All of these questions are indispensable to the tasks of creation and revision.
I am in no way asserting the primacy of "good" English over slang, experimental constructions, dialect, and so on. But if a writer uses a comma splice or a run-on sentence or a fragment, she should do so intentionally, not accidentally. When revising, she ought to notice that she has written a sentence with a dangling modifier and should understand why such a construction turns her sentence into an absurdity.
I feel like such a crank for making these pronouncements. But I love English. It's a gorgeous, flexible medium; and it's my medium; and I care about it, right down to its least little "and." Lately, however, I've been reading a number of essays by fairly well known writers and teachers of writing, and I'm saddened at how inexact some of these pieces are. Many are filled with misplaced or dangling modifiers, commas without musical or syntactic purpose, pronouns without antecedents, subjects and predicates that do not agree. And for the most part these infelicities seemed to be accidental, as if the writers were either ignorant or indifferent to the language-logic problems in their essays. In other words, the writers' grammar revealed that they were essentially inattentive to the trajectory of their own thoughts, feelings, and ideas.
So why do they write? Does the primacy of subject matter--say, a writer's focus on political or social ills--trump her responsibility to attend to the medium itself? Is language just a cog in the polemical or narrative machine? Can you wonder why I feel melancholy?
4 comments:
I'm going to quote Molly Bloom here:"Yes I said yes I will yes." Agree with you, that is.
The quality of analytical or observational writing that I have recently read seems to be deteriorating. There are some exceptions, but it seems that we have taken an "anything goes" approach to our mother tongue- if we say it, it's the same as writing it. Which, of course, is false.
Writing has the potential to put so much more into it than merely acting as a transcription of thoughts. Unfortunately, students often use their writing assignments as a hurried drive-by of language, settling on a complacent completion over an in-depth composition.
Since I've taught both college & high school, I have to note that most students I've worked with paradoxically assume they have command over their language and are poor at grammar.They expect to make mistakes, but don't feel a need to correct them. Perhaps this is perpetuated by teachers who aren't confident of their own grammar.
Personally, my students are starting a sentence-diagramming unit next week. This is in conjunction with writing a research paper. I'm hoping they apply their knowledge of structure with their writing.
But then again, I'm a bit of a Pollyanna....
Sentence diagramming is such helpful visual aid to understanding a sentence. I can't understand why the exercise is so often reviled. And interestingly, I talked with a teacher the other day who routinely teaches students to identify misplaced modifiers--and of course, it's one of the most entertaining sections of the grammar lesson. So I don't believe students are inherently against grammar comprehension. They like puzzles; they like comedy. But somehow, maybe, they can't fuse their grammar knowledge with their creative expression--can't think their way through their own sentences.
I think that one of the main reasons students have a hard time understanding the effects of their own grammatic choices is that they rarely read with much conscious awareness of these effects. They don't even see grammar as a series of choices--for them, it is about rules, so it must be about inflexibility. I wish more teachers would teach grammar at my school in conjunction with reading, so students could experience how grammatical flexibility translates into personal style, and how style affects their experience as readers.
That's a good idea, a very good idea.
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