Does Grammar Instruction Make Better Writers?

In this charming Chronicle of Higher Education article, Rachel Toor (Eastern Washington University/Spokane) says she went to a progressive elementary school that didn’t spend much time on traditional grammar. When she arrived in junior high, the kids who had gone to Catholic schools had a clear advantage. “They could drink without getting caught,” says Toor, “and were able to name the parts of speech.” 

Toor never caught up, and to this day grammarians intimidate her. “Once someone starts talking about verb moods, dangling whosits, and misplaced whatsits, I squirm,” she says. “When I try to struggle through their prose explanations, my brain hurts. I’ve learned enough to be able to explain basic things to my students about common writing mistakes, but I can’t get technical. I refer to words ending with ‘ing’ as ‘ing words.’ (I know that they can be gerunds or participles, and that there’s a difference.)”

But even with her grammar deficit, Toor believes she’s developed tricks that help her write more effectively, and she passes these along to her students:

• Write with strong nouns and verbs. “We need to scrub dirty, flaccid bits from our sentences if we want to be read,” she says. Don’t turn verbs into fuzzy nouns – for example, investigate into investigation. She scans her own writing and replaces words that end in –tion, -ism, -ty, -ment, -ness, -ance, and –ence with a muscular verb or a concrete noun.

• Use active construction. “How many unnecessary uses of ‘this,’ ‘that,’ and ‘there’ can I lose?” she asks. “I go on search-and-destroy missions for the forms of ‘to be’… and kick the suckers to the curb (when it makes the sentences stronger).” 

• Eliminate redundancies and junk phrases. Trim “completely finish” and “consensus of opinion” and delete “in the event that,” “on the grounds of,” and “under circumstances which.”

• Chunk writing so it’s readable. Readers should be spared “boring blocks with long uninterrupted paragraphs made up of endless sentences,” says Toor. One trick is to shrink a manuscript to 50% size on the computer and look at the overall graphic appearance. Is it too blocky or too fragmented?

• Read your prose aloud. “[C]lunky sentences sound a whole lot clunkier when you’re forced to listen to them,” says Toor. 

• Use the dictionary rather than the thesaurus. John McPhee calls the thesaurus a “mere rest stop in the search for the mot juste.” The dictionary can be more effective in finding just the right word. 

• Do a first draft in PowerPoint. “You think about your article – or book – as a series of slides, come up with the right titles for each, list the main points you want to make, and then shuffle them to get the right order and flow,” says Toor. “Your slides become cue cards to guide you in writing the full document.” 

• Read Strunk and White. Toor loves The Elements of Style. “I reread the little book frequently, because it always delights me and it never hurts to be reminded,” she says. “I often decide to break their rules, and I’m OK with that. I bet White would be as well.” 

Toor says these simple tricks have worked well for her. “Grammarians can chastise me for my faulty education, lax attitude, and insufficient attention to the complexities of language,” she concludes, “and they will probably do so in sentences that give me a headache… In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for tricks to steal and then pass along to my fellow linguistically untutored writers so we can all try to make our sentences better.” 

“My Little Bag of Writing Tricks: How I Translate Grammar Directives Into Moves I Can Use to Make My Sentences Better” by Rachel Toor in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 6, 2013 (Vol. LX, #1, p. A58-59), http://chronicle.com/article/My-Little-Bag-of-Writing/141309/ 

From the Marshall Memo #501