Connie Weaver wrote about her experiences before the Michigan's Board of
Education:

>  I happened to be attending that
> meeting to speak out on another issue, so I took my allotted 3 minutes to
> point out that such a narrow focus--mine you, this was one of the twelve most
> important things students were to learn in K-12--encouraged teachers to focus
> on teaching correctness at the sentence level rather than teaching students
> to plan, organize, draft, revise, and edit real pieces of writing, for
> genuine purposes.  The result?  The standard was revised to read something
> like "Students will write grammatical sentences, paragraphs, and
> compositions."  No other language standard remained in the list of twelve.

Unless I have missed something in the recent discussion, everyone on the
list believes that all students need to focus on planning, organizing,
drafting, revising and editing real pieces of writing for real purposes.

As someone who teaches the pre-service teacher course on grammar at my
institution, I readily admit that knowledge about language/grammar will
not help anyone plan, organize, or draft a text.  I know of no theory of
language/grammar which will help with those aspects of writing either.
Is this where there is a divergence in views about the role of grammar?

However, all of the suggestions about writing in the texts college
students buy talk about the importance of revision and editing.  I am
sure there are people who can revise and edit texts and not articulate
why they made the changes they did. For those of us who are not so
gifted, being consciously aware of possible choices will be more
successful more of the time than just saying "it just sounds better."

Unless I have missed something, the writing that people do in actual
jobs away from school is done in collaboration with others.  I know that
anything I write that has more permanence than posts to a listserv I ask
colleagues to read and comment on.  Such comments are always more useful
when specific terminology can be used.  Conscious knowledge about
possible choices in organizing a text and the nature of language/grammar
can make those comments more insightful.

Bob Yates