Edmond, your eloquent reply confirms my impression that we do agree 
about the educational principle. (Incidentally, I apologize for the 
snappish tone of my reply--some of us have very raw political nerves 
here.)  I especially like your concluding sentence, "We are not 
condemned, are we, to
say nothing but 'Ooo!' as explanatory of how the enchantment works 
upon us?" That's just it: I'm trying to unpack the "ooo" with the 
help of grammatical terms.

If I understand Brad Johnston's reply, my effort to encourage my 
students to consider the rhetorical effects created by, for example, 
Orwell's use of dashes (which have been prohibited to them by past 
teachers) and fragments and comma-less polysyndeton (not to mention 
the entire menu of solecisms deployed by Wolfe or Sillitoe in their 
literary impersonations, or the brilliant solecism evident in the 
final line of Stanza 8 in Whitman's "Lilacs...") is "a brick or two 
shy of a load." Please let me know, Brad, if I have that right. It's 
been my experience that grammar really does come alive for middle 
school and highschool students when it is dedicated to rhetorical 
analysis and then applied to their own writing. They understand 
without too much difficulty that great writers are as concerned with 
sound and rhythm as they are with rules. The artful deployment of 
punctuation is one way to manage these musical qualities (and most of 
my students are better musicians than writers), the deliberate use of 
fragments and amplifying effects (like comma-less polysyndeton) would 
be another. Most of my colleagues teach a form of grammatically 
standard writing which simply doesn't conform to the literature we 
actually read in class. Not to mention the grammar of student speech 
outside of class.

With regard to Craig's reply, I am reminded of an article Stanley 
Fish wrote a few years ago for the New York Times. In it, he 
described his success teaching grammar by having students invent 
languages of their own and, in their reports describing their 
efforts, provide grammatical analyses of those languages. This 
approach seems to me to represent a constructive solution to the 
problem we're entertaining. I wonder if anyone has tried something 
like this. I'd love to--I just don't know how to set it up.

Michael Dee



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