Grammar in the Classroom

As someone who enjoys learning grammar, I found the readings for this week particularly interesting.  I spent my undergraduate career studying grammar intensive languages like Latin (a language that insists upon and continually examines its own grammar) and Ancient Greek (an exceedingly frustrating language that seems to break its own rules more often that it follows them). In light of this experience with the grammar systems of other languages, I agree completely with Micciche that it is entirely senseless and almost silly to think that grammar doesn’t generate or alter meaning and that it therefore should not occupy a privileged place in the composition classroom.

I thought that Micciche’s definition of rhetorical grammar as distinct from the prescriptivists’ slavish obedience to the rules purely for the sake of the rules and the descriptivists’ insistence that usage alone should govern the rule made sense for the unique environment of the composition classroom. I think that spending at least a week considering how grammatical choices create meaning would be quite useful for students.  I understand the ability to make informed grammatical choice as an element of rhetorical flexibility, and therefore, the goals of the composition class.  I found Williams’ discussion of the ‘phenomenology of error’ similarly interesting, and the article makes a solid case against the relevance of prescriptive grammar in the composition classroom.  It seems his discussion of the often arbitrary nature of grammar rules reinforces Micciche’s argument for the use of a rhetorical, rather than either a prescriptive or a descriptive approach to grammar for beginning composition students.