I think I have pretty good grammar skills. I was a voracious reader as a kid, and as a result, have a good sense of what sounds right and what doesn’t.
But I have absolutely no knowledge of “formal” grammar. Don’t know what a genitive is, a past participle, future perfect tense, whatever the hell. I’ve never diagrammed a sentence. At some point in school I’m sure my english teachers mentioned all this, but as I already knew what “sounded right” from all my reading, I never cared to pay attention.
I get the sense this is abnormal. Friends of mine report that they had all these rules and classifications drilled into their heads repeatedly all through elementary and middle school.
I can’t imagine that memorization of all the technical terms and rules is at all useful in learning to speak or write effectively. What worked for me was simply reading enough good writing in order to form a sort of linguistic muscle memory.
It’s not abnormal at all. You can absorb the applications of the rules without ever knowing what they are. When I was getting my English Ed degree there was one class that had a high failure rate: Grammar. Reading and writing a lot improved people’s gramatical skills and many of them wrote beautifully, but these things did very little to help them qualify what it was that they were actually doing when they wrote…even as they were getting As on all their papers in other classes.
I also get the sense that rote learning of the rules of grammar has gone in and out of vogue over the decades. Perhaps it’s because I moved a lot as a kid, but in twelve years of schooling I never spent more than a week diagraming sentences, so when I landed in a college grammar class I was shaking on identifying what predicates and indirect objects were. Some of my classmates knew it cold, and others were also unsure since they hadn’t had them drilled into them either - we were the ones who were correctly using gerunds but had never heard the term before, and so on.
I went to very, very good schools as a kid. Top twenty private schools in Britain. I don’t remember being taught much about English grammar beyond the parts of speech at any point in my undergraduate education. Any point.
Nevertheless, I’m quite a good writer, and my work always conforms to normal grammar rules (though to this day I have trouble with differences between UK and US usage).
However, I have a very thorough grounding in Latin grammar, which is pretty easily applicable to English grammar, at least as far as case, mood, tense, and so on.
Grammar must have been out of vogue when I was a kid, as I never got further than adjectives in school. I did do a lot of foreign language study in HS/college and learned a lot of grammar that way, but only as applied to Danish/German/Russian etc.
It is certainly possible to absorb grammar through reading and developing a sense of what works. That’s what I did, and so did most of my peers, more or less.
The first problem with this method is that it doesn’t work for everyone, and it mainly only works for people who read a lot. My sister read just as much or more than I did, but her spelling is atrocious and her writing is less than stellar. Her talents lie in other areas, and without direct instruction in language arts, she didn’t attain the level she could have (though I think her spelling is just instruction-resistant). Meanwhile, people who don’t read a lot never do develop much of a sense of what works.
The second problem with the absorption method is that you’re never quite sure you’re doing it right. I know I have blind spots, but I don’t know what they are. I was 30 before I realized the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer,’ and I had made that mistake in my master’s thesis at age 24. :smack: Whenever I write, I’m only about 90% sure that I’ve got it right–and I’ve done quite well with the method. My friend’s husband, a businessman, was not so fortunate, is not so confident now, and gets his wife to correct all his business correspondence, because she had an excellent education and can see his mistakes.
So: I make my kids work through the best grammar program I can find. My 10-yo learned about gerunds last week–and so did I. We diagram, which allows us to see how the sentence is put together; I never did that in school but I can see a value in it now.
Yes, it’s helped. When I’m editing and run across a horribly screwed-up sentence, I sometimes diagram it to figure out where the writer was trying to take it.
I agree with dangermom (not unusual for me.) Sure, unconsciously learning the rules of grammar works for a lot of people, but not for everyone. Even for those of us who learned grammar easily and naturally, knowing the parts of sentences can help with punctuation and sentence structure. For example, I very rarely have trouble knowing when a comma is appropriate because I know what they are for. I can forget one once in a while by accident, but if I’m studying a sentence to see if I’ve punctuated it correctly, the commas won’t throw me. I know their purpose in grammar, so I know if I’ve done it correctly.
Similarly, by knowing the rules of grammar I can fix badly written sentences. I can fix phrases and clauses, combining and unraveling as needed, to repair the sentence because I know what each phrase and clause is for.
I diagrammed sentences in my freshman English class in HS and also took two grammar classes at the college level. I believe the knowledge I gained in those classes improved my writing skills.
I learned only the basics (noun, verb, adverb, adjective) till I took German in high school. I recall my German teacher was appalled that only one or two students knew any more of English grammar and now he was going to try and teach us German.
I still think some of the old grammar rules are interesting, but hardly used anymore.
I recall one time I said, “Hopefully it won’t rain,” and got hit as it was not correct. It seems hope implies aspiration and one cannot aspire to not making it rain, therefore you can’t use hope in that context.
I don’t think that kind of error comes from lack of “formal” (i.e., explicit) grammar instruction, so much as a general ambivalence in the discourse community, and usually gets decided by style guides.
The OP needs to clarify what kind of grammar “skills” are referred to, (Only writing? For formal discourse, or general?), as well as what kind of improvement. There are so many grammar “rules”–actually, so many aspects–to grammar, that it’s ridiculous to think explicit study is how we learn all of them competently. For written skills, it’s something that really comes from heavy reading of the same type of material one wishes to write.
Other than teaching one how to put labels on words, does diagramming really help one’s grammar? I feel that’s really something that linguists need to do, not writers.
The whole reason Chomsky’s universal grammar theory is so popular is because that’s how grammars work - somehow during language acquisition, everyone gains the ability to recognize whether a sentence is grammatical or not without being specifically taught to. So I can tell that Thomas two fish has. is not an acceptable English sentence whereas I would have gone to the park if it hadn’t rained. is, and so can a tiny child who’s never had a language arts class. Personally I think this is awesome even if I’m not completely sold on UG.
But it’s true - there are some things that are aspects of formal English writing that I wouldn’t have known without school. For instance, the second sentence of this post is a fragment. It would certainly be acceptable in spoken standard English, as would If I was queen I would give everyone a sandwich. and Ben is taller than me. even though both of these have some kind of errors.
I guess the big argument is: if people keep saying and writing sentences like the ones I mentioned above, and no one tells them not to, is that okay? After all, I still understand what you mean, and to me Ben is taller than I. doesn’t sound ‘right’ even if it is more grammatical. …Well, if by ‘more grammatical’ you mean ‘more like Latin’, because that’s where a lot of this stuff comes from.
Yes, it’s helped. I know what “sounds right” from a lot of reading. I know how to edit copy that “sounds wrong” in an efficient and effective manner from more formal grammar instruction.
My experience sounds identical to the original poster’s.
For some reason, however, occasionally a ‘teacher voice’ shouts out in my head every time someone uses the words
“Just because X doesn’t mean Y”
I HATE THAT WORD USAGE!!
WHERE’S THE SUBJECT IN THAT FRIGGING “SENTENCE”?
And EVERYone uses it, reporters and wordsmiths alike.
Ugh.
It should be “The fact that X happens doesn’t mean Y follows”
FFS
Just…don’t really ask me to explain why, 'cause I don’t know the terminology.
And that’s my only real grammatical gripe, no doubt due to some long-forgotten class where my head was down on the desk while I was reading something useful in my lap.
Like Narnia, say.
I never seriously studied grammar until I took French in college. It was there that I for the first time had to consciously keep track of subjects, objects, etc. in my speaking and writing. In fact, I imagine I learned more about English grammar in my first French course than I did in any dozen English courses before or since. Not that I’m any master of grammar in any language, but studying a foreign language vastly improved my knowledge of my native tongue.
Et maintenant, la grammaire des deux langues me confond. Or something like that.
You’re right that it’s really usage, but they often get taught together. My kids’ grammar books also cover usage–there are lessons on lay/lie, can/may, and other things people often have trouble with.
I have found it helpful. It’s particularly good for analytical types who see writing as too squishy for comfort, but it’s also useful for just about anyone. If you have a sentence that doesn’t look right, but you’re not sure what’s wrong about it, it’s often helpful to diagram it out. The problem will become obvious, because it won’t fit into the diagram.
Try putting the verb in. Ben is taller than I am probably sounds better to you. That’s what makes it correct (not Latin)–the verb is implied, and Ben is taller than me am won’t work. Also there’s a technical explanation, but I won’t bore you with that unless you want it (partly because since I’m half-educated, I’m only half-sure of what that explanation is, though I think I know).
That said, I’m not bugged by Ben being taller than me in spoken language. I would be bugged if it was in a written piece, but my speech can get pretty ungrammatical. I say ain’t and so on.
A student today asked another teacher, “Has you got one yet?” The other teacher, quite properly, asked the kid to rephrase the question: “Do you have one yet?”
But the thing is, the first sentence was, linguistically, perfectly grammatical. It was following rules of African American Vernacular English, a set of rules that are internally consistent and just as clear as the rules of what we call standard English.
But the rules of AAVE can keep her from getting certain jobs. So when she writes sentences like that, I also confer with her to get her to see “how we talk at school,” and to write accordingly.
What a formal understanding of grammar can do is it can help you write according to a set of rules that aren’t how you grew up. It might help you know that in standard English, you never say, “That gift was meant for Roger and I.” You’d put “me” in for “I.” You’d also never say, “If anyone will get shafted by this new rule, it’ll be me.” You’d put “I” in for “me.”
I did a lot of formal study of grammar, and it’s helped me in such situations. It helps me when I’m writing for an educated audience, usually, because I don’t make standard English errors very often. (And sometimes some overeducated douchebag will erroneously claim something I wrote was an error, such as the douchey professor who marked me off for using “since” as a rough synonym for “because”). But it certainly doesn’t help me write more clearly, or write more naturally.
Just because you think that construction is a mistake doesn’t mean it’s a mistake.
Just modifies “because you think that construction is a mistake.”
“Because you think that construction is a mistake” is the subject (specifically “Because you think” is acting as the subject, with “that construction is a mistake” acting as an adjectival clause).
I think I’m analyzing this correctly. What I know, however, is that it’s a grammatical sentence. And how do I know it?
Because grammar is observational, not dictatorial. If it’s a construction that people use all the time, that’s how you define a grammatical construction.
English doesn’t follow the rules of Latin. Many people don’t realize this, but it’s true. English has other rules, and you best learn those rules by observing how English speakers speak.
Behold. Did my previous sentence have a subject? It certainly has less of a subject than the one that you objected to.
No. Not at all. But it really came in handy in college Latin. Seriously, the people who struggled with Latin the most didn’t really understand English.
Imho: the study of grammar improved my knowledge of grammar, but made my writing ability worse…it’s great when you have to teach grammar, but terrible if you wanted to become a writer.
That’s because English isn’t Latin, and Latin isn’t English.
Until relatively recently, in Britain studying “literature” meant studying only Latin and Greek. English itself (the “vulgate”) wasn’t worthy of study in Higher Education. No one “studied” English as a language–Latin was the thing. So systematization of the study of Latin as a language (and its grammar) became the default for study of any language. When people started to describe English grammar–and teach it formally to speakers of other languages–they just lazily imposed Latin grammar concepts upon it, even when it didn’t really fit.
To this day, bad ESL teachers have their students “conjugate” verbs in English, even though verbs in English don’t really have conjugations.