Correction: There is no error.

Caveat Lector:
I don't want to be the grumpy person who can't accept a new idea. I am weary of posting contrarian posts but it just simply cannot be helped. What I read is ill-informed, however well-intentioned.

“Can grammar knowledge be conceived as extending the work of cultural critique?” (718).

I wonder why this question needs to be asked. Let’s get meta-rhetorical for a moment and consider what audience this is directed towards. Obviously it is to persuade cultural critics of some form or another. Who are these folks? Well, aside from this, Micciche describes a central error that I come across all too often:

“Another argument contends that if students can't articulate their ideas in a comprehensible form, correct grammar does nothing to improve their writing” (720).

Micciche knows (as I sigh with relief) there is no correct grammar. It’s made-up. Any time I see the term “correct” I simply am at a loss. Who decides? There are rules of effective use and legibility but “correct?”

Micciche elaborates what I myself would like to say to anyone who is a corrector: “Rhetorical grammar instruction, in contrast, emphasizes grammar as a tool for articulating and expressing relationships among ideas” (720). However on the next page she cites her Quintillian example about the cultural values (or lack thereof) implicit of his use of the terms “boys.” I do not see this as “grammatical” so much as “lexical.” She wrongly concludes that “it's possible to see how the intimate study of language it encourages has enormous potential for studying language as central to constructions of identity and culture” (Ibid.). This “intimate” study is not about grammatical structure but about lexical choices. She errors further by citing Kolln, saying that “Rhetorical grammar enables such readings because it is ‘gram-mar in the service of rhetoric:' which means that grammar is never divorced from ideological functions’” (Ibid.). There is no statement I could disagree more with. Linguistics has shown, exhaustively and extensively—I cannot stress this enough for anyone reading this and please, for the love of language and life itself, go tell it on the mountain—that grammar is cognitive, context-free, universal. Ideology has nothing to do with grammar. Perhaps, what Micciche is writing about is not grammar in the linguistic sense, but in the very pedantic sense she is trying to swerve away from.

Read this as Micciche quotes Elizabeth Bruss:

"In reading theory, one often notes where the energy of the writing seems to have been expended in lush diction or well-turned phrases, in the juxtaposition between sentences or organization of larger episodes. From this, one receives a first (if not always a lasting) impression of the power or delicacy of mind that informs the theory" (qtd. In 722).

This is the problem with Literary Study. Why is she reading theory like this? Because certain theories are self-referential? Some are, but no. Obviously she isn’t recommending actually understanding the theory but appreciating it like a poem. The story and poem lover in me asks: Why not read a poem?! Many theorists think they are poets, or more-than-poets. They aren’t… at least not in the good sense. Notice the almost worshipful tone. It almost reads: “Bow down to the theorist cause he (yes He) juggles words. Don’t worry your pretty little head with getting the actual ideas. Just stand in awe of the beauty of his text.”

Citing bell hooks shows the inversion of the problem, not the solution:

"the incorrect usage of words" expressed "a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resis-tance" (hooks, qtd. In 723).

The problem is this: because there is no “correct” usage there is no “incorrect usage.” What hooks imagines as subversive should never have been subversive. Language is internal, context-indifferent, cognitive. If we eliminate the idea—the binary—of incorrect vs. correct real work can finally get done. 

As Micciche herself notes, we need to begin teaching students to see “how [language] is crafted and directed rather than as simply "correct" or "incorrect:” Thinking of language as correct or incorrect distorts it into an objective medium consisting of ahistorical rules and truths, obscuring the living quality of language” (724). And, as a writing teacher, I itch upon reading “language” twice in this last sentence. Just sayin’…

What is the context of this famous sentence below?

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

It makes no rhetorical sense, but is grammatically “correct.” Conclusion: Grammar isn’t rhetorical.