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Chapter Five:The (Place) of GrammarPart One My time at teachers’ college (1982 - 1986) coincided with the final years of an eraduring which the teaching of anything that was remotely associated with the very vagueterm ‘grammar’ was actually frowned upon and, believe it or not, was discouragedwithin the teaching establishment.By the latter half of the 1980’s the next stage of the very lucrative

Grammar Wars

was really heating up and I found I could agree with nobody. I was a conscientiousobjector. The trouble was that those against the teaching of grammar threw the babiesout with the bathwater; while those in favour, tended to drown them in it.Such extremes of ideology operating

within

the education establishment were aspur to my developing an approach to language theory which I could actually explainand justify to children, and so, motivate them to express themselves coherently. Theopposing forces in the grammar wars have kept me securely in the middle of the roadever since, a place I have come to appreciate for its peace and quiet.Even handwriting had, mistakenly, become associated with

grammarians.

Therefore many an

anti grammarian

said: why hamper a child’s writing style by forcingthem to make conventional letter shapes? Don’t mark spelling, it’s so negative; and socalled ‘grammar’ was dumped.

Ironically, as a result of this, when individuality became the ‘god’, there was nodiscipline within which many children could express and develop a personal style. Thereally sad thing is that many of the people electing not to teach children writing orspelling in school, had received the true basics at home themselves, and assumed thatall children had received the same. They hadn’t, and they don’t.That such a thing as this could actually happen when I had done rows and rows of swirls and circles, ascenders and descenders as a child, to correct poor handwriting,and I had done my spelling corrections, further alerted me to the very flimsy nature of teaching fashions, and made me seek for something more lasting. There had to beanother way, something outside this narrow political arena, something which pupilsfrom all walks of life and from all eras could benefit from, and, of course, there alwayshas been. But you have to take off your political blinkers to see it. In this chapter I will show why the illusion of ‘grammatical rules’, and its antithesis:mere anarchy can only gain ascendancy when the reality of Conventions and AccuratePersonal Style and their intended combination (the perfect synthesis which, ironically,predates either of those ridiculous stances) has been usurped, and then forgotten. Inthe course of doing this I will show you what I think grammar really is, and therebyanswer the only relevant question about grammar:

Armed with a knowledge of thedurable conventions of English, plus the ability to read, to write, and to think; how muchdoes a seventeen or eighteen year old need to know about ‘grammar’, in order to treat King Lear with the respect and care he deserves?

Naturally, my first task was to arrive at a working definition for the key concept whichunderpins this chapter:

Grammar

.This was not as simple a task as I had naively hoped, and, in fact, this chapter is areflection of my own journey to arriving at just that – an accurate definition of theword

grammar

. I was to discover that the whole subject of ‘grammar’ is a remarkablecan of worms.However, I started simply, by looking the word up in dictionaries, including myChambers 20

Century Dictionary (1983). My eventual working definitions mainly useas a starting point the definitions given in this dictionary, which I have always founduseful because it gives substantial clues as to the etymology of key terms.To begin with,

Grammar

(from the Greek for ‘a letter’) is often thought to be thescience of a language; or perhaps it is a branch of linguistics? Maybe it is a set of rulesfor, and is also the art of, the correct use of a language. Perhaps it is all of these thingsand more, or none of them.

The one thing most definitions of grammar do have in common, though, is thegraphic derivation of the word. Grammar would therefore perhaps more accuratelyhave been defined as the science, or analysis, of

written

language only; if grammarianshadn’t already shot themselves in the foot by pretending to analyse written language interms of their spurious ‘parts of

speech

’. When written language is studied in terms of the real parts of speech: Intention, vocabulary, syntax, phrasing, pronunciation,intonation, and context; then reading, which is what such study is all about, becomescritical analysis and appreciation, which involves the understanding of all aspects of written communication.

To get a feeling for the varied concepts signified to different people by the word ‘grammar’ today,what it is, what it entails, you only have to consider a fraction of the 46,000,000 or so entries for theword, to be found on Google.

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The (Place) 0f Grammar

There is a place for grammar, it just doesn't know it, yet.

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Category:	School Work > Essays & Theses
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Upload Date:	02/24/2009
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Tags:	art grammar Applied Rules conversation civilisation conventions fashions whims (more tags) art grammar Applied Rules conversation civilisation conventions fashions whims bathwater meta language (fewer)