grammar: you can't live with it and you can't live without it

I feel completely scared and anxious when I think about having to teach grammar to future students. The last grammar class I took was in tenth grade. I have no recollection of a nominative this or a demonstrative that. I’ve joked with friends that I need to buy a copy of grammar for dummies before I set out to take the praxis II test. After reading this chapter, I have come to realize that I make many usage (rather than grammar) mistakes within my writing and speech. Despite this, I know that I am a strong writer. Yet, I would have much trouble trying to explain why I write the way that I do and why it is the correct way (for the most part) to write. At this point, my writing skills seem to reflect an instinctive process.

I do not believe that grammatical lessons breed outstanding writers. If this is the case, my writing skills would have gone downhill after tenth grade. Williams provides us with multiple examples that support this claim. Most of the Spanish classes I took in high school revolved around usage and grammar, and I learned a great deal about usage and grammar in these classes. Because I already had experience with writing in my native language, I could produce adequate pieces of writing in these classes. However, if I had no experience with writing before taking these classes, I would have had a very hard time trying to write essays and narratives in Spanish. When learning another language, it is much easier to comprehend that language through reading and listening. It is more difficult to speak and produce one’s own writing. I would not have been able to produce good writing in these classes based solely the grammatical lessons from my teachers. I had to rely on my innate skills. I can imagine that writing can be seriously hard for students, even in their native languages, if they have never learned how to write well.

I was helping my teacher grade essays written by twelfth graders at the school that I am observing at. Most of the essays were very poorly constructed. After reading this chapter, I recognize that most students had trouble with usage rather than grammar; however, there were quite a few grammatical mistakes as well. The errors that stuck out to me the most were sentence fragments, run on sentences and punctuation errors. I was shocked with what I read. A week later I was helping the teacher grade ballads for the same class. Most of the ballads were amazing! I was so confused! For the most part, the students’ exercised proper usage within their creative poems. Their word choice and sentence structure were significantly better as well. How can this be explained? Why can these students construct creative and profound poems, but cannot write a very simple essay? These results were pretty much the same for the majority of the students. I feel as though these observations reflect Williams’ ponderings on competence and performance. Obviously, all of these students have competence, but their performances vary depending on the assignment. Can anyone explain this or come up with a theory for why this is happening?