LANGUAGE and GRAMMAR
Most of you will find that creativity, purpose, development, and order are components of the essay that you can teach novice writers. You will read finished essays that have a purpose and are developed in a recognizable organizational pattern. You will be pleased that your students have learned how to work content into form; moreover, you will be impressed that young adults can maturely articulate their ideas in written form. What will dissatisfy you often, however, is students’ lack of mastery or competence in grammar and mechanics. Sentence construction errors, lack of conciseness, or usage errors, for instance, compounded by a weak vocabulary, undermine the best essays.
If you were to ask professors in the university community about their students’ writing, nearly all would complain most about students’ weaknesses in language and grammar. Why? One reason is that students’ ability in that area is weak to average. Another reason, and a more important one, is that teachers grading essays can easily pick out grammar and language errors-at least the ones that they know. They can spot a sentence fragment and, as is often the case, hold that error and others responsible for everything else that they did not like about the essay.
Grammar refers to much more that surface errors like sentence fragments or misuse of commas; grammar includes idiomatic usage, parallel construction of terms or ideas, coordination and subordination of ideas, concise use of terms, consistency in tone, appropriate use of appositives, relative clause usage, and so on. You will not hear colleagues complaining about students not using appositives.
The truth is, most writing never rises to the standards outlined in grammar textbooks. Even the most admired essays, scrutinized closely, will possess some kind of ‘error.’ That hardly prevents them from being excellent essays or good essays. Writers exercise freedom from grammar constraints often-skilled writers, that is. What is the difference between skilled writers exercising their right to periodic freeing themselves from grammar constraints and novice writers doing so? Novice writers often do not know that they are or are not writing grammar errors in their essays. They will know, however, if you tell them.
During the course of a fifteen week semester, many of you will spend so much time on teaching creativity, purpose, development, and order, that you may never find the time to work on sentence style or vocabulary-building exercises. At week thirteen, you will probably still be telling students that pronoun-antecedent disagreement is a grammar error and that is why they keep receiving lowered grades on their essays. Students who consistently make surface errors like pronoun-antecedent disagreement or comma splices throughout the semester, even after they have been shown how not to make them, are writing errors into their papers for a reason that you cannot remedy in fifteen weeks. Pronoun-antecedent disagreement and comma splices are common, yet easily remedied errors. Why do students continue to write errors into their essays? Difficulty in modifying writing habits adopted in primary and secondary school, grammar phobias generated by sentence diagramming exercises, immaturity, not allowing enough time for editing-whatever the reason, students whose grammar remains at an incompetent level in English 101 after writing numerous drafts will continue to experience difficulty in courses where professors give low marks for grammar errors. Basic grammar is learnable-students who cannot or will not write at a level of grammar competency expected by most university faculty should be made aware that they are not likely to pass English 101. You can communicate this information to students a number of ways-through conferences, on drafts of their essays, on draft review sheets or during electronic conferencing (with their written permission). Students whose papers are sprinkled, not riddled, with grammar errors are probably acquiring grammar skills at their own paces and showing every sign of becoming competent writers. Persistent and distracting grammar and mechanic errors warrant attention, not a grammar or spelling error or two.
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Published by: Department of English Language and Literature
Last Update: July 13, 2003 by English Web Manager
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