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