Scott,

 

You’ve put your finger squarely on the problem, and it is one of research design.  What you’re asking for is qualitative research, a body of methods and an approach that is showing up more in anthropology and other social sciences.  Much of the anti-grammar research makes the quantitative assumption that what’s real is what can be counted or measured.  If it can’t be counted or measured unambiguously, then it’s not real.  It’s an argument I’ve had repeatedly with my colleagues in psychology.  The T-unit is such a measure.  It’s about as subtle as you can get with counting things when it comes to research on language, part of what spawned my maxim “Anything in language that you can count doesn’t.”  There are sound statistical methods for determining whether the researcher’s judgment of construction type or of complexity is reliable, but these measures and methodologies tend not to have been used much in composition research, at least not in that area of it focused on grammar and writing.  Ironic, considering how composition researchers have embraced quantitative and ethnographic models in other areas of their research.

 

It is also, unfortunately, the case that good qualitative studies tend to take longer and are harder to get funding for because of that.  And because most graduate faculty in composition and rhetoric have been trained in the anti-grammar literature, they don’t encourage their doctoral students to undertake such dissertations.

 

Herb

 

 

Dear List, I have been using using Don Killgallon's Grammar for Middle School: A Sentence-Composing Approach with my seventh grade classes.  Here's an example of a first sentence from a short story by one of my students, a native speaker of Arabic and not previously a very good writer:   His face pale, his shirt stained with blood, his pants tattered, his shoes ripped and dirty, the Roman soldier advanced toward the castle, stepping over the rotting bodies of the British, every step taking him closer to the enemy's territory, every step taking him closer to death.   Prior to learning to use absolute phrases and participial phrases (as well as the other modifiers he learned) this student could not have written such a sentence.  He could not even really think about improving his style. Teaching students to consciously control sentence structure works, in my experience.  Incidentally, students universally enjoy it.   Why don't the studies which measure the effectiveness of teaching grammar look at the  specific constructions and sentence types taught and the changes in the frequency and effectiveness of their use?  Clause length and other such measures seem clumsy and not particularly useful as measures of writing skill if we are trying to improve student writing.    Scott Woods

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