Grand Finale

I thought the best way to explain all this was to share my final Autogrammography with you all who care to read it:

Before this class, Approaches to Grammar, I was against grammar in every way, shape, and form. With my prior experiences, including the infamous Wall of Shame I encountered in my freshman year of high school, it would be a large understatement to say I didn’t like grammar. This Wall of Shame left me in a maze of confusion and embarrassment. My teacher, Mrs. Thionnett, whom I have great respect for, took grammar to the extreme and had students write their mistakes in grammar on the wall of her classroom. I soon found myself making mistakes on purpose in an attempt to show Mrs. Thionnett the error of her ways, but my mockery of grammar was futile.
Today this seems like a predestined situation to inform me the necessity of grammar instruction. No, I don’t wake up on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, dying to go to class and diagram sentences, or point out appositives, but I have found a new respect for grammar and its use. It was the realization that I need grammar to succeed in life, whether it is professional or academic that helped change my mind. Before, with my immature antics of mocking grammar, I wasn’t able to see the uses it had stored for me in the future. What use am I talking about? Grammar is more than a word, a noun to be specific. A noun, a thing that is often misunderstood – as David Mulroy points out in his book, The War Against Grammar, something as important to our nation as the Declaration of Independence is not completely understood without the use of grammar in one form or another (Mulroy 17-19). And it is the declining understanding of grammar that is leaving students without the power to fully understand difficult texts. Now, if grammar were to be taught in the fashion it used to be, I’m speaking of the old fashioned grammar school, knuckles being cracked by rulers type of instruction; I don’t know if students would actually benefit from this anymore than they do now, but a deep understanding of grammar and the philosophy of grammar allows one to come to terms with this negative stigma that comes along with this loaded noun – grammar.
This semester I participated in the Oklahoma Research Day. Being a requirement for the capstone course in the English department, I willingly made a poster out of my research concerning the poetry of World War I. For this Research Day, I was positioned to setup my poster next to the graduate students of Northeastern State University of Oklahoma. These students, being the substantial graduate students they are, were not required to defend or present any of their work. The thesis advisor for all eight of these students stood next to the first chapter of her student’s theses. This display of academia at its best left me disappointed. Not only for the fact that graduate students were not present for their work, but for the tenacity of the advisor to confront me about the grammar of my research poster. For the sake of this paper, she will be named Prescriptivist Mary Sue, PMS for short. Ms. PMS was more than willing to inform me about the nature of an appositive. Seeing as I was only just learning about appositives in Approaches to Grammar, I could not feel responsible for incorrectly using an appositive. At first, I was shocked that a professor would go out of her way to point out a mistake on my work when her own students who are supposed to be at a higher level of education than me were not even present. Ms. PMS brought back memories of the wall of shame. This time the wall was full of my own work, my mistakes, more like transgressions in the eyes of PMS. Looking back on the grammatical mistake that only an English major would notice, I feel that the error was sophomoric on my part. Even though I used the appositive incorrectly in this case, I had used it correctly many times before, leaving me to ponder on a few of the trends within this world of grammar. After long thought and being upset over the matter I realized how the different conventions of Standard Written English (SWE), grammar, and grammatical terms differ, proving to me that Ms. PMS’s prescriptivism was merely an act snobbery, caused by her knowledge and pledge to the convention of Standard Written English and my lack of awareness with grammatical terms.
Ms. PMS did not have a firm grip on reality, much less grammar. She told me, and others that came to look at my poster there were problems with the grammar, but I have learned grammar is nothing more than the structure that allows any language or dialect to have meaning. It was not my grammar that was incorrect on the poster; the meaning I wanted was still produced. I was uninformed when it came to the grammatical terms, which are solely names for the different parts of grammar and its structures. Ms. PMS was drunk with the conventions of Standard Written English – the specific rules used in American English that allow the prescriptivists to prove their point about appositives and other menial matters.
After my encounter with the second Wall of Shame, my personal views of grammar have made a dramatic shift. Rather than loathing every aspect of grammar, I find myself at peace, knowing that grammar can be used for good and evil and this outlook gives me hope for my career and future students. I know my students will never have to uphold a Wall of Shame, or be emasculated for failure to understand a convention of Standard Written English. I will bring grammar into the class in a non-threatening way, focusing on the writing of the students rather than their grammar. With the enhancement of student writing comes a better understanding of grammar in every sense. I don’t plan to break out a grammar book in a class unless the students ask for help in a certain area, but if I am forced to take on a grammar course there is no doubt that I will start with a philosophical approach, allowing students to comprehend the nature of grammar before they are flooded with sentence diagramming. In David Foster Wallace’s article, “Tense Present,” he takes on the prescriptivists, reviews a new dictionary, and provides insight into the world of grammar. Most importantly, he offers a genuine view of student’s views on grammar, “The reality is that an average U.S. student is going to go to the trouble of mastering the difficult conventions of SWE only if he sees SWE’s relevant Group or Discourse Community as one he’d like to be a part of” (Wallace 53). As Wallace points out, most teachers that students run into with grammar have a memory much like mine, making them want to dodge every aspect of grammar (53). The thought of being the centerpiece for SWE to my students’ forces me to realize I have the ability to make or break what a student thinks about grammar. My personal views will be reflected in a welcoming light, allowing students to see that grammar is not merely a tool for snoots to gain unprecedented power. This is the approach that will lead students into a desire to study the structure of languages. Mulroy argues that grammar is declining, but I believe it is because of the common approach (43-50). If teachers would take a personable approach to grammar, students will not be intimidated. In return, our culture can come back into a desire to study grammar without being a part of the elite group of snoots.
My Autogrammograpy has changed in some ways. I understand the use of studying grammar. I can differentiate the different forms of grammar people refer to. I feel the need to study grammar slightly more. But, for the most part, since completing Approaches to Grammar, I have found a new respect for grammar, realizing that a well rounded understanding of the conventions of Standard Written English enables me to correspond with groups I never would have been able to before.