Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

The four basic principles of grammar.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Grammar is better approached through principles than roles. Four basic, sequential principles answer almost all issues: a functional sense of the eight parts of speech, the integrity of the clause, ellipsis, and restriction. Through awareness of these principles, teachers and students alike might dispel the mystery of grammar and thereby improve their sentence craft.

**********

In T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Sir Thomas More reaches the spiritual conclusion, "The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason" (47). Although the stakes might seem smaller, writing clear, accurate sentences is, for many students, treasonous business. Theirs is often an erratic education built on intuition and subjectivity, never mind that the kind of written discourse demanded of them in college and the workplace is logical and public. In response, teachers are prone to formulating grammatical laundry lists, sometimes calling errors such as sentence fragments or comma splices "Deadly Sins." This reactionary spirit might be well meaning--call it tough love--butt it can also intimidate, making grammar seem an unassailable monolith. Responding to that response, I aim to demystify grammar, giving students basic tools as they proceed across and beyond the curriculum.

Grammatical issues--and larger terms of rhetoric, for that matter--are usefully approached given what legal theorists call principles and rules. To define, principles are statements of substantive objectives while rules are directives that, when implemented, confirm the originating principles. Concern over public safety, for example, generates rules limiting traffic speed. However, erratic enforcement of those rules creates instability in actual roadway conditions. Just how erratic is the question on every driver's mind: at what increment should speeding violations actually be cited? Obviously, if everyone who drove 26 in a 25-MPH zone were cited, we would need many, many more traffic officers. On the other hand, when enforcement loses its feeling of being universal, public, and tangible, we cry injustice, the law rendered unstable. To arbitrate, we have judges--not clerks.

For composition teachers, the distinction between principles and rules is analogous to that between romantic description and classical prescription. At risk to descriptive grammar is ambiguity, to prescriptive grammar pedantry. The former taps what I call fluency, the latter literacy. This difference is apparent, notably, in the control many native speakers have while speaking but not writing and that many ESL students have while writing but not speaking. Ambrose ("The Devil's Lexicographer") Bierce, in distinguishing that we are "conscious of what we feel; aware of what we know" (20), all but anticipated the effect: although native (which is to say, fluent) speakers rarely commit idiomatic errors, they are only conscious--but not aware--of grammatical rules. Theirs is a fluency of intuition...