Dr. Medly requests . . .

>> --an excellent grammar class, entitled Modern
>> Grammar, taught by an exuberant prof. out of an intelligent, exuberant book.
>>
>> That book drew on the concepts not only of traditional grammar but of
>> structural and transformational grammar as well.
>
>Odile, thanks for that exuberant testimony to your experience with
>an engaging grammar teacher & course.  Who is the author of Modern
>Grammar?  What is the "slimmed down" volume of that work which you
>still use?
>

**********************************************************
***** Caution: Enthusiasm waxs prolix.  (Sorry)
***** Best scanned, if so inclined, with cup of tea in hand and
***** a few unhurried moments.
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With pleasure.  Since I've alluded to it before on this list, I didn't want
to seem to be tooting the same horn.  But, really, I've not found this
combination of sophistication, readability, insight, and sheer common sense
in any other grammar text.

The text for the class I took is _Understanding English Grammar_, now in
its fifth edition, by Martha Kolln (Allyn and Bacon, 1998).  This is an
in-depth treatment, suitable for a full semester-length class.  Students
unfamiliar with traditional terminology will need some ramp-up time in the
beginning.  All terms are glossed within the text, and there's a robust
glossary in the back as well.

At the beginning of the book, following a philosophical discussion of
grammar and what it is, English is introduced as a system that can be
largely understood in terms of ten base clausal patterns.  I've seen other
systems that use a fewer or greater number.  Scott Rice's very excellent,
unfortunately now out-of-print, book _Right Words, Right Places_ speaks in
terms of three.  This analysis hardly seems worth the time, but he's
attempting something different in his book.

Within that discussion of system, sentence diagramming is introduced solely
as a means of visually representing key relationships (the main structures
of basic sentence types: SVA, SVC, SVO, SVOC, and so on), and throughout
the book these diagrams reappear as illustration, in support of the text.
This duplication will not reach some students, but for many it supplies two
ways of thinking about things.  There's something about the way, as a
student, you construct a mental model when things are told you in words and
when things are shown you in diagrams.  Traditional sentence diagramming
cannot get at the underlying linguistic relationships in the way that tree
diagrams can; but, on the other hand, for nonlinguists I find sentence
diagramming far more intuitive and useful.  It gets you further faster.

Once students grasp these ten basic relationships and can pick them out in
simple (grammatically simple) sentences, they are introduced to the idea
that these same relationships underlie not only independent but dependent
clauses as well.  Every adverbial subordinate, every nominal subordinate,
every adjectival subordinate--all of them--follow these same patterns.
(With the caveat that these patterns cover a majority of the sentences we
construct, not absolutely all.  No system of analysis can accomplish that,
language being so fluid and complex.)

But, wait, that's not all.  Turns out that every verbal (infinitive
phrases, participial phrases, gerund phrases--phrases that partake of the
nature of the verbs that spawned them) follows the same predicate portion
of the pattern: simply lop off the subject slot and you've got ten patterns
that (nearly) every verbal follows.

The end result is that students are given a systematic and comprehensive
means for analyzing sentences in successive chunks: top-down, from large to
small, including nested clauses and phrases.  Rather than attempting to
parse the sentence from beginning to end, as a series of words built up
into structures (bottom up), students--once trained--can begin to recognize
first the larger structures whole, not unlike the way we automatically read
and parse meaning, and then see the intricacies of the structures nested
within (top down).

Another feature of the book is the distinction made between form (what
things look like) and function (how they behave).  Throughout the text
structures and relationships are parsed in terms of both form and function,
which provides a double window on this world.  One reinforces the other,
even as one assists (by being what the other is not) in defining the other.
When they get good at it, students can shift from one gear to the other,
understanding the mechanics of the sentence in two very different ways.

The final chapter introduces the rhetoric of grammar: how the grammatical
choices we make alter import and effect.  For writers, this will of course
be the most fascinating section.  And it is this material that the slimmed
down follow-on book pursues.

_Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects_ (Allyn and
Bacon, 1999) introduces the sentence patterns (in a slightly simpler form)
and then moves deftly into a discussion of rhythm and cohesion.  Rather
than seeking to analyze the system of grammar per se, this book shines a
lens on sentences and how they speak to us, on what we do to manipulate
them and why.  It explores the grammar of rhythm, of cohesion, of long and
short, of modifiers, of punctuation.  It is a writer's text, and no writer
should leave school without it (thinks I).

Focused as it is on the rhetoric of grammar, this second book does not
utilize sentence diagrams (though I introduce them in my class to
illustrate basic relationships), and tends to use less of the technical
vocabulary.  Every quarter I get one or two whose mentality and interests
are more suited to the larger, more deeply analytical version--I steer them
towards it, watching their eyes grow round with lust--and every quarter I
get one or two who don't quite get it.  But I have adults, working folks,
who come once a week, sometimes very tired, with many other distractions in
their lives.  This isn't material to skate through.  It must be studied and
mulled over.  The majority perk up and respond, rising to the call.
Because these are adults, in class "on their own time," they're usually
strongly motivated to learn.  They also don't want to put up with a lot of
fluff.  They want insight, they want results.  Though I am no trained
teacher, I get a consistently good response from this material.  The evals
sometimes fault me for my technique, but almost to a man (and woman ;-)
they give high marks to the text.  And, more telling I think, I get
students coming up to me, entirely unprompted, at break or the end of class
that first evening who tell me they've never thought of grammar in this
way.  I get email testimonials, I get *thanks* (thanks!) at the end of
class.  One quarter on that last evening I was standing by the door
chatting with a student, and when I turned around, I realized the rest of
them were all waiting, lined up to thank me and shake hands before leaving.
I felt like the bloody queen.

In the interests of being completely fair (and fairly complete), there are
two things I've noticed about the text that do not work for every student,
at least with my audience.  The first is the tone, which can be slightly
offputting to some adults.  The text is written for an academic audience of
undergrads.  It assumes a readership of eighteen to perhaps
twenty-four-year-olds.  This stance grates a bit on some of the more mature
(30s, 40s) students.  But that's just my particular age group, and we
simply read around it.  The second issue is that, in order to remain slim
and focus on the effects of various syntactical constructions, the text
attempts to sidestep deeper grammatical analysis and terminology.  This
doesn't wash with some students who take naturally to the more exacting
analysis and who know just enough to be dangerous in class.  I have to take
those discussions offline, or the rest of the class begins to glaze over
and become confused.  With the amount of material the text does cover, and
considering the skills students exit class with, I consider these minor
points.

I might mention too (in my own testimonial) that this text, in combination
with another fine, fine book--Joseph Williams' _Style: Toward Clarity and
Grace_--altered absolutely the way I edit.

But that's grist, as they say, for another mill.



Odile
(warming up this morning before writing a doc plan)