When Michelle taught her first high school class, she fit the stereotype of the uptight English teacher obsessed with correct grammar use. Though her teacher pens were full of purple and green ink instead of red, the result was the same: her studentsâ papers marked with every error she could find. That, she thought, was good grammar instruction. After all, that was how her own teachers had taught grammar so many years earlier: identify the mistakes in student writing relentlessly and follow that with worksheets, lots of worksheets, to hammer home correct usage.
Experience is a persuasive guide. For years, Michelle continued to mark up her studentsâ papers. She passed out stacks of grammar worksheets in the hope that her students would finally put that comma after the introductory adverbial clause. Strangely, while her students dutifully completed these stand-alone exercises, their own writing never seemed to show much improvement. They continued to make the same grammatical mistakes theyâd always made. On some level, Michelle was aware of a disconnect here. Why couldnât her students transfer the lessons of a worksheet to their own spontaneous writing? She heard other teachers complain about students as lazy or careless. Was that it, or was she missing something important? Assigning those photocopied grammar worksheets felt like teaching and fit comfortably with the conventional expectations of an English classroom. But it was hard for her to ignore the obvious. Her students didnât seem to be actually learning anything.
Eventually, Michelle heard about teachers exploring different ways to teach grammar and help their students write better sentences, passages, and papers. While trying out new approaches seemed sensible, she was reluctant. After all, what if her students asked a question that she couldnât answer? There was so much about grammar that she didnât know. And so, fear and tradition kept the bleeding papers and the worksheets front and center for many years, until Michelle really started learning what grammar is and how it really works.
Defining Grammar
As a rookie teacher sharing resources with her colleagues, Michelle found that many veteran teachersâ writing rubrics had the acronym âGUMâ at the bottom, for Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics. She was confused by this acronym. Wasnât grammar just the rules and expectations for comma placement, sentence structure, verb choice, those lovely parts of speech, and the like? There were entire booksâshe had to buy them in collegeâthat told her the rules of grammar. Why did these teachers differentiate between grammar, usage, and mechanics, and for that matter, what did these words even mean?
Grammar
âGrammarâ has a far simpler definition than Michelleâs college grammar books led her to believe. At its most basic, grammar is âa description of language structureâ (Kolln & Gray, 2013, p. 1), a map of the innate understandings of language forms that all native speakers possess. You will never hear a first-language English speaker say âRed the on had shirt a studentâ because such an utterance is not grammatical, meaning that it doesnât fit the underlying map in our minds for how English is used. What speakers will say (âThe student had on a red shirt,â âThe student had a red shirt onâ) may vary for different reasons, but it will always be understandable. All developmentally normal first-language speakers have grammatical structures hard-wired into their brains; researchers have found that even before children are born, they are differentiating the particular rhythms of their motherâs language (Kolln & Gray, 2013). By eighteen months of age, children have already identified predictable patterns (that is, theyâre picking up the grammar) of their first language and have begun to use them regularly. In English, these patterns include subject-verb (âKitty runâ), verb-object (âFind Mommyâ), and noun-modifier (âHotdog allgoneâ) (Curzan & Adams, 2012, p. 322).
We discuss various American English dialects later in Chapter 2, but itâs worth mentioning a point here on which all linguists agree: all dialects are grammatical (Adger, Wolfram, & Christian, 2007; Charity Hudley & Mallison, 2011; Green, 2007; Labov, 1972; Redd & Webb, 2005; Simpkins & Simpkins, 1981; Wheeler & Swords, 2006). That is, all dialects follow rules that every first-language speaker can understand.1 âHim and me went to the storeâ will be received in different ways according to the expectations of the listener, but the meaning of the sentence will rarely be in doubt. Itâs as understandable as âHe and I went to the store,â and that makes it grammatical.
Crazy as it may sound, grammar is really about understanding, not about âcorrectness.â
Usage
In our experience, usage is what most people mean when they use the overarching term grammar. âUsageâ can be understood as the arbitrary rules of language that have been deemed correct by mainstream groups. We think Sledd (1996) provides a helpful explanation:
The study of usage is the study of approved choices among socially graded synonyms. I ainât got none means âI donât have anyâ or âI have none.â All three sentences are equally clear; all are governed by stable rules of grammar; but ainât and multiple negatives are in some quarters socially disapproved. When we teach correct usage, we teach linguistic manners of the privileged. Correct usage is usage that observes those constantly changing manners.
(p. 59, italics in original)
What is considered âcorrectâ changes across time and place. Many English teachers will pounce quickly when students use double negatives (âI donât got no cootiesâ), but there was a time when such usage was acceptable, as the examples below illustrate:
Ther nas no man nowher so virtuous ⊠(Chaucer, âThe Friarâs Taleâ)
I never was nor never will be. (Shakespeare, Richard III)
Not until the printing of Robert Lowthâs infamous (and we use âinfamousâ purposefully here) 1762 book A Short Introduction to English Grammar did the double negative attain its current frowned-upon status. Sayeth Lowth, âTwo Negatives in English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an Affirmativeâ (as cited in Schuster, 2003, p. 60), managing in one sentence to condemn a popular usage while also spawning a now-common grammar meme (When you say âI donât got no cootiesâ it actually means you do have cooties!!). Languages evolve, and when they do, what counts as correct changes as well.
Lowthâs argument against the double negativeâthat two negatives make a positiveâis a long-standing fallacy, one we often hear when talking with teachers about grammar and American English dialects. Turns out that many modern languages (such as Spanish, Portuguese, and French) employ double negatives, and weâre pretty sure that when French speakers say, âJe ne sais pasâ [literally, âI donât know nothingâ] they donât actually mean âI know.â Triple negatives reinforce the silliness of these bogus language prescriptions. When a Southern English speaker says, âJimmy donât know nothing noways,â does that speaker really mean that Jimmy does know something ⊠but not at all? Of course not. The intended meaning of the statement is clear to any native listener, and superimposing the rules of one discipline (math) onto another (language) produces absurdity rather than clarity. With matters of communication, the rules of logic often donât apply.
Our point here is that usage rules are arbitrary, dictated and elaborated in the college textbooks Michelle bought and in innumerable style guides on bookstore shelves. People are quick to ascribe a moral dimension to language use: your use of âincorrectâ or âbadâ grammar must indicate something deficient in your upbringing, your culture, your soul. But these judgments and the rules they arise from rest upon shaky ground. Todayâs acceptable usage is tomorrowâs faux pas.
That said, we are not arguing against the use of a standardized language. Far from it. We think a standardized language is vital, as it provides everyone a means for common communication. Bottom line, grammar and usage are two different aspects of language study. Itâs helpful to remind ourselves that usage invokes a set of rules that changes according to mainstream beliefs and practices, and that these beliefs and practices are often then (mis)labeled as âcorrect grammarâ and put into books to be studied and applied. These ârulesâ about correctness are not set in stone but change according to the whims of dominant social forces.
Mechanics
âMechanicsâ simply refers to the technicalities of writing: conventions such as spelling, capitalization, and basic punctuation. Many people group mechanics with usage, which is perhaps understandable. As with usage, the rules of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation change according to time and place. For example, Lowth capitalizes both ânegativeâ and âaffirmativeâ in the sentence we cited earlier, a move that would be considered incorrect by todayâs standards. Travel to England or Australia, and youâll find that English spellings differ according to place and culture (such as colour and color, aeroplane and airplane, draught and draft, and theatre and theater). The concept of mechanics is bounded by a small list of writing technicalities, similar to the restraints found in usage. One major difference, however, is that mechanics is a concept that only applies to written language. Take heart in knowing that not even the worst grammar snob can judge what you say for non-standard spelling, capitalization, or punctuation.
A Very Short History of Grammar and Usage in the English Language
We live in a time of digital technologies and tools that have transformed how we communicate. New modes of writing (email, instant messaging, texting, tweeting) and communi cating (emojis, vines) have, however, come with an accompanying set of reactionary worries. The general fear, really a kind of âmoral panicâ (Thompson, 1998), is that these new developments are a corrupting influence on conventional literacy: each time a student uses âLOLâ or âgr8tâ or âi m ritn 2 uâ in an essay, itâs sad evidence of a slow decline toward language chaos. At the risk of overgeneralizing, many folks with these concerns seem to see themselves as lonely defenders of linguistic purity, protecting classic standards of correctness against a looming, ungrammatical horde (we talk a bit more about this perspective in Chapter 2). Sometimes this struggle will include an homage to the supposed educational rigor of yesteryear and a plea for back-to-basics, no-nonsense grammar instruction. Through such a lens, itâs easy to imagine an unadulterated, stable, and consistent history of English grammar and usage stretching back across the centuries, with rules and conventions long-established if not inscribed in stone, all of it now under threat from modern sloppiness.
This version of English grammar history is, however, an illusion. The truth is a lot more complex. Turns out that language standards have always been in flux, changing across time and place, and buffeted by powerful forces of self-interest and control, and people have bemoaned the gradual but constant fall of the English language since such a thing existed.
To understand where the peculiar love of deconstructing sentences and parsing the language into questionably definitive parts of speech came from, we have to go all the way back to 100 B.C.E. Greece, which is where Dionysius of Thrace wrote the first grammar book based on written rather than spoken language (Lindemann, 2001). Before this text, thinkers such as Aristotle and the Stoics saw grammar primarily as a way to better understand speech, while also accepting that language was a product of human nature and, therefore, susceptible to imperfection and anomalies (Weaver, 1996). However, as the centuries marched on, Dionysiusâ first grammar book became the basis for Latin grammar texts, which in turn heavily influenced the creation of English grammar books. Oddly enough, many traditional guides used in teaching twentieth-century American schoolchildren employed the same strategies of Dionysiusâ book: memorization of definitions, the use of literary models, and the parsing of language into parts of speech (Lindemann, 2001).
By the Middle Ages, grammar had taken on a moral dimension in Europe. The predominant social institution of the time, the Roman Catholic Church, deemed any change in language âemblematic of the human condition since the fall of grace in the Garden of Edenâ (Lind...