Group, 2004). Echoing previous investigations of this type, the report concluded
that: “there is no high quality evidence ... that the teaching of the principles un-
derlying and informing ... ‘syntax’ has ... [any] influence on the writing quality
or accuracy of 5 to 16 year-olds”; and that “there is no high quality evidence that
the teaching of grammar ... [of any kind] is worth the time if the aim is the im-
provement of the quality and/or accuracy of written composition” (p. 4).
The consensus of language scholars, however, has not had much effect on
the curriculum. Weaver (1996) proposed several reasons for this puzzling situ-
ation. She suggested, for example, that teachers and administrators may simply
be “unaware of the research” (p. 23) or, even worse, “do not believe the re-
search” (p. 24), perhaps owing to the observable tendency among some teach-
ers to discount empiricism as being contrary to humanistic values. In this view,
the goal of writing and writing instruction is not to prepare students to succeed
on college writing tasks or in the workplace but to aid their personal develop-
ment as human beings. Fueling this tendency are books on grammar that ignore
scholarship so as to consider the act of writing through an artistic lens. Noden
(1999), for example, wrote:
The writer is an artist, painting images of life with specific and identifiable
brush strokes, images as realistic as Wyeth and as abstract as Picasso....
Hidden beneath ... [a writer’s work] often unnoticed and unappreciated,
lies a grammar of style, a combination of artistic techniques as worthy of
respect and awe as any museum canvas. (pp. 1–2)The artistic sentiment is rooted, as we’ve seen, in the classical notion that
literature represents a purer and better expression of language than everyday
speech. Many of us may agree with this sentiment whenever we imagine an
ideal world. But we must understand that the idea of “the writer as artist” be-
longs to a bygone era, at best, when education catered to the privileged leisure
class. Equally problematic is the fact that the “image grammar” Noden advo-
cated is merely a repackaging of Christensen’s (1967) work on sentence com-
bining. Based almost exclusively on literary writing, it ignores research
indicating that gains in writing performance through sentence combining are
temporary, as well as research and theory suggesting that the primary focus of
instruction should be on the whole essay (Callaghan, 1978; Crowhurst &
Piche, 1979; Green, 1973; Kerek et al., 1980; Kinneavy, 1979; Perron, 1977;
Sullivan, 1978; Witte, 1980).
Today’s classrooms call for a more realistic view, given the large number of
nonnative English speakers and native English speakers with limited language
skills. In terms of sheer quantity, most writing is performed in the service of
government and business, where there is no place for artistic writing. Teachers
TEACHING GRAMMAR 29