have a professional obligation to consider what will happen to students who are
taught to “paint images of life” but who must inevitably meet the demands for
analytical and interpretive writing in college and the workplace.
The Nature of the Problem
There are several reasons why grammar instruction does not lead to improved
writing. One that can be hard to accept but that nonetheless is crucial to effec-
tive teaching is thatmost of the errors we find in the writing of native English
speakers are not related to grammar.When Connors and Lunsford (1988) sur-
veyed college composition teachers, for example, they found that punctuation
was cited as the most frequent error. Although some knowledge of grammatical
structures certainly makes correct punctuation easier, it isn’t necessary. At the
public school level, the most common errors also include spelling and capital-
ization—but not grammar.
Let’s consider an excerpt from a student essay that is illustrative. The student
was 11 years old and produced the following on an impromptu writing test that
asked for a narrative about something interesting that happened to a friend:
on wednesday Sam was on his way to school it was like a ordemerly day. on
Friday though he got detenshon whitch was proberly a good thing because
he found a book on the front cover it said “Lets go” so he took it home and
opened it and then he was rushed forwards in. (Henry, 2003, p. 1)Such writing is typical for students this age, and our initial response is
likelytoinvolvesomeshakingoftheheadandaninwardmoanoverthe
abuses to the language. Close examination, however, indicates that the errors
here are related almost exclusively to spelling, capitalization, and punctua-
tion—which are conventions of writing that do not exist in speech. The stu-
dent produced only one grammar error. In other words, what we see in this
passage is the student’s lack of knowledge and/or lack of control of writing
conventions, not a problem with grammar. If we fix the convention problems,
we have something that is quite readable:
On Wednesday, Sam was on his way to school. It was like an ordinary
day. On Friday, though, he got detention, which probably was a good
thing because he found a book. On the front cover it said, “Let’s go,” so
he took it home and opened it, and then he was rushed forwards in.Notice that I left the single grammar error intact: “he was rushed forwards in.”
Although ungrammatical, we can understand what the student wanted to com-
municate—something along the lines of “the book pulled him in,” or “he fell into
30 CHAPTER 2