Do you hate grammar?
I was an English teacher for 37 years, and I always hated having to teach grammar. At least, I hated teaching what most people seem to think grammar is. You know, parts of speech, subjects and predicates, direct and indirect objects, punctuation, all that stuff. I much preferred to work that stuff into teaching composition. That is not to say I dislike grammar. I don’t. I love grammar.
Grammar is the structural foundation of our ability to express ourselves. The more we are aware of how grammar works, the more we can monitor the meaning and effectiveness of the way we use our language.
Grammar can help to foster precision, to detect ambiguity and to exploit the richness of expression available in English. And it can help everyone—not only teachers of English, but teachers of anything, for all teaching is ultimately a matter of getting to grips with meaning.
Meaning is what grammar is all about. Getting the proper words in the proper order so that our listeners and/or our readers can understand what it is we are trying to tell them. It’s entirely possible for us to understand ungrammatical sentences also, but proper grammar ensures a measure of elegance.
The famous poet and biographer Carl Sandburg once wrote: “I never made a mistake in grammar but once in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.” That’s an understandable sentence, right? But is it elegant?
Marilyn vos Savant is a columnist, author, lecturer and playwright who became famous when she was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under “Highest IQ” (228!). She writes “Ask Marilyn,” a Parade magazine Sunday column in which she solves puzzles and answers questions on various subjects.
She once said something like: “When our grammar is perfect, it’s invisible. But when it’s flawed, it prompts strong negative associations.”
She also said that the aim of education should be to “be able to correctly pronounce the words you would like to speak and have excellent spoken grammar.” Hard to argue with that.
Grammar is a tricky beast. Consider the following sentence: “A woman without her man is nothing.” Perfectly understandable, grammatically correct, because the words are in proper order for understanding. Mix those words up in some different order, “without a nothing woman her is man,” and it’s not grammatical, not understandable, the words are not in a “proper” order.
But it is possible to change the meaning of the original sentence without rearranging the words. Consider these variations: “A woman, without her man, is nothing” or “A woman: without her, man is nothing.” Notice the grammatical differences? Same words, same order, different meanings.
So punctuation, whether we do it with our voices or in writing, is essential to our understanding and an essential part of grammar.
Sometimes, when people find out that I’ve been an English teacher, I’ll hear comments like, “Oh, then I’d better watch my grammar!” I guess their attitude is “once an English teacher, always an English teacher,” and I’m going to be correcting them if they make any oral miscues. Not gonna happen, folks! I don’t evaluate my friends’ usage.
Some of my friends have expressed to me that they think all our modern social media channels will be the death of grammar because the practitioners of email, tweeting, hashtags, Facebook, etc., seem to ignore the formalities of written expression.
I’m not worried about our language and its conventions disappearing. Most of the people who communicate through social media know the rules, and they’ll follow them when the situation demands it. Their tweets and emails are solely for immediate communication, and when they must interact on a more formal basis, they will. They’ll get the words in the right order, and they’ll punctuate and spell properly. Grammar is too tough to die!
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