Indeed, the English-speaking world is littered with excellent writers who
have experienced limited contact with formal grammar study.  Still, many
students arrive in my college classrooms lacking mastery of the grammar of
standard written English.  The number of problems is small.  Noguchi lists
them in a few lines:  subject/verb agreement, pronoun antecedent agreement,
fused sentences/comma splices, unwanted sentence fragments.  Not many more.
I would add a few punctuation problems that reflect lack of grammatical
mastery (e.g., the comma after a fronted subordinate clause).

These can be handled through modeling exercises or even with such devices as
sentence combining that don't require any grammatical metalanguage.  My
desire for students to have such a metalanguage is tied not to necessity but
to effeciency.  It is simpler to help a student overcome grammatical
limitations (in standard written English) if that student shares the
metalanguage with me.

Unfortunately, I seldom get to try this out.  The few who master the
metalanguage remedy their own shortfalls.  "Sometimes I feel so
unnecessary!"

Jeff Glauner
Associate Professor of English
Park University, Box 1303
8700 River Park Drive
Parkville MO 64152
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http://www.park.edu/jglauner/index.htm

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