The Decline of English Grammar

What’s the difference between commas and semicolons?” Professor Stephen Ross asks his fourth-year English class, tapping the thick stack of marked papers on his desk.

His cheeks are flushed and he’s panting, a less-than-subtle sign he wasn’t pleased with the papers. A heavy pall of silence falls on the room.

Finally, a timid voice squeaks out from the back, “But aren’t they the same thing?”

Grammar. A word punctuated by a groan or pronounced with a smile. Some hate it, others love it, and, according to some English teachers, students don’t know it.

In an era that worships video and disdains literature, grammar is declining. As one student recently put it, “Who the hell cares about grammar anymore?”

Well, some still do-your future boss, for instance. Good grammar is traditionally the hallmark of professionalism, the telltale sign of an education. Confuse “then” and “than” in your cover letter and your potential employer will practice a game of hoops-using your crumpled resume as the ball and the trash can as the net.

Apparently, many professors care as well.

“There is no such thing as a good essay paper without good grammar,” says Ross, the aforementioned English professor. “Grammar and content are completely inseparable.”

Kim Blank, director of UVic’s writing program in the department of English, says, “Grammar isn’t just something arbitrary. It’s there mainly so that when you write something, it’s clear. A comma in the wrong place will literally change what someone will do.”

It certainly changes what professors do to a badly punctuated paper. Often on the receiving end of the professor’s red pen, students feel the sting of bad grammar. Those who split infinitives, dangle participles and misplace modifiers pay a toll in red ink-and possibly a few letter grades as well. Toss punctuation into the mix, and you have a potential cocktail of confusion. It’s a subject only English majors may actually know about.

Or maybe not. A few UVic professional writing professors agree: English majors are just as clueless as the rest.

“I find that English majors lack basic knowledge of grammar,” says Susan Doyle, who teaches a copy editing course for UVic’s Department of English. “I honestly thought English majors would have more background in grammar.”

“Most English majors don’t know grammar,” agrees Blank.

When even English majors, who spend four years immersed in literature and writing, struggle with the basics of grammar, there’s clearly a problem. Somewhere down the scholastic chain, students are failing to learn grammar.

The fact is most university students are still grammatically clueless.

In 2003, 37 students were registered in remedial English courses at UVic. In 2005, this figure jumped to more than 100 students-an increase of more than 150 per cent and a sign that perhaps all is not well in the B.C. education system.

High schools no longer include grammar as a major component in their curriculums. A read through the Ministry of Education’s English Language Arts curriculum for grades eight to 12 shows “grammar” mentioned only a few times.

Comparatively, the Ministry of Education’s 1941 Junior High School Curriculum Guide (grades seven to nine) devoted an astounding seven pages to the subject of grammar. In fact, the same grammar topics taught in grade seven, 60 years ago, are now being taught only in third-year linguistics courses. At least, that’s the case at UVic.

“There’s a huge gap in what high schools say they teach and what’s actually being taught at university,” says Stephen E. Hume, who teaches English and journalism courses at UVic.

“High school students, generally, are completely unprepared. I’ve had some [first-year] students come up to me and tell me that during their last four years of high school, they weren’t taught one second of grammar.

“There’s no real bridge between high school and university,” he says.

Ostensibly, the official bridge between high school English and university English is the provincial exam. But Hume remains skeptical.

“The provincial exam is no bridge. Students should be writing for at least four years, not just the four months preceding the provincial.”

The English provincial exam itself has undergone heavy changes since the “70s. A comparison between the 1970 and 2004 English provincials reveals an astounding difference in level of difficulty.

“I bet a good percentage of English professors wouldn”t pass it,” commented Michael Cullen, who teaches first-year English courses at UVic, when showed the old provincial. “I don’t know how we ever passed those exams.”

What’s more surprising is students pursuing university degrees in order to teach language arts aren’t required to take grammar courses.

“A student studying to become a high school English teacher could probably go all the way through university without taking any grammar classes,” says Blank.

The only grammar courses available to UVic’s writing and language education students are in the form of electives, either in the linguistics department, or in a professional writing or English composition course that touches on some aspects of grammar. Will education students ever learn grammar? Probably not.

Hume recalls a fourth-year language arts class in children’s literature he once taught at UVic: “With a few exceptions, [education students] were the worst prepared students I ever had. Some of them could barely write sentences; I had to teach them everything from scratch. It was a joke.

“I had one student who was going off to teach high school English in a month,” Hume says, shaking his head in disbelief. “In an essay, this student actually called J.D. Salinger’s novel, “The Catcher and the Rye.”

“Grammar is to writing as anatomy is to surgery,” Hume insists. “You wouldn’t expect surgeons to graduate from medical school without a grounding in anatomy would you?”

However, it’s this traditional method that presents a problem for some educators.

“Teaching grammar is a form of classroom control,” says Robert Graham, an education professor at UVic. “You are trying to control kids. Me smart, you dumb. It all revolves around power.

“You’ve got to see grammar in a much broader context than simply “if the kids don”t know the rules of grammar that society is somehow going down the drain.’ You’ve got to back away from that.”

According to Graham, who was once a high school English teacher, the whole purpose of the high school language arts curriculum is, and should be, to teach practical skills, not to teach students about grammar. His complaint is that high school teachers don’t allow their students any measure of critical thinking.

“Teachers spoon-feed the kids,” says Graham. “This to me is a way bigger problem with high school students than the fact that they don’t know how to use semicolons and restrictive clauses.”
Graham denies that high school or university curriculum is causing a decline in student grammar. Rather, he suggests university English professors expect too much from students.

English professors “cannot assume that these students will come fully formed like out of the head of Zeus with all these skills and talents and abilities,” he says. “They don’t have the right to assume that.”

Nor is Graham particularly concerned that grammar is not part of the curriculum anymore.

“Every bit of research that’s been done the past 50 years shows the same thing: the isolated study of grammatical rules has no affect upon creating students that can write well,” he says.

Deborah Begoray, chair of UVic’s curriculum development program, says the purpose of the education program is to impart life skills, not to churn out students with traditional knowledge who have memorized things that won’t impact their lives.

“What’s important?” asks Begoray, “That a student learns to pick out the differences between a noun and pronoun, or has the ability to write?”

The debate about the decline of grammar is by no means a new one: it’s an age-old battle between the forces of prescriptivism (the belief that traditional grammar should remain static) and descriptivism (the belief that language change is natural).

In the 1700s, Jonathan Swift, famous author of classical greats such as Gulliver’s Travels, bitterly lamented “the corruption of our English Tongue.” Among the various inventions he attacked were “bubble,” “put,” “banter,” and “bully.” Despite Swift’s angry expatiations, our language seems to be doing just fine with these “corruptions.”

“No one’s really at fault,” says Blank. “We’re in a visual culture. People don’t read very much any more. We’re also living in an age of hyper-communication. People are used to short snappy things. Emphasis is on speed, not quality.”

Graham suggests the decline in grammar may have to do with the decrease in people’s attention spans.

“Look no further than the Internet,” he says. “Look no further than MSN. Look no further than these cultural influences that students with shortly reduced attention spans will take, over a piece of written communication.”

Indeed, the Internet is plagued with enough sloppy prose and dreadful grammar to send even the most jaded grammarian into fits. Cyberspace has given birth to a new form of writing, a hodgepodge of misplaced commas, atrocious acronyms and garbled sentences-a system of writing completely unrestrained by the complexities of traditional grammar.

While “net speak,” as some call it, may have rid itself of such superfluities as grammar, the price has been high: clarity. It’s a momentous effort to decode certain forms of writing on the Net, such as on Internet forums, where traditional rules of grammar are spurned and the creative muse of “write how you speak, verbatim” is invoked.

The Internet may not be the only piece of technology contributing to the decline of grammar. Long gone are the days of messy handwritten essays-now pages and letters are perfectly formatted, compliments of the word processor.

But while a word processor may dot your i’s and cross your t’s, the built-in spelling and grammar checker will not ensure error-free papers-a fact that seems to elude many students. Yet for many, the sum of their grammatical knowledge is clicking the spelling and grammar check button.

Drive a car without knowing the road rules, and you’ll eventually crash; use the grammar checker without knowing the rules of grammar, and you’re playing a game of craps. The latest version of Microsoft Word (Office 2003) fails to catch the basic punctuation, grammar and spelling errors in the following sentence: The build in grammar checker leaves far mooch to be desired its lacks ability to now basic sentence error.

While the debate between tradition-loving prescriptivists and pragmatically minded descriptivists rages on ad infinitum, how can the average person improve their grammar? Trade in that shiny new PlayStation 2 for a dusty old grammar book? Enroll in a grammar course? Date a grammarian?

“Learn a language,” Doyle suggests. “It’s a good way to gain familiarity with grammar.”

Meanwhile, not every English professor is foaming at the mouth over students’ lack of grammar. Some take a more relaxed view.

“Students aren’t good at grammar and they can’t spell at all, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t smart,” says Cullen. “Language is changing. We just need to reinvent the language. Make it living again.”

Cullen has a point: Language is changing. But is it changing for the better? In an age bombarded by empty representations, bedazzled by the flashing of electrons, and infatuated with speed, does the tedium of grammar really matter?

If it means the difference between a job or no job, if it means the difference between sounding educated or uneducated, if it means the difference between an A and a B grade, then it matters.

To communicate effectively, you need grammar. And that’s really what good grammar is: the art of communicating well.