Grammar

Do you believe that formal grammar instruction is essential to someone’s education? What role should the instruction of grammar play in the writing classroom? Does the type of writing classroom influence whether writing should be taught?

While I value the knowledge of grammar, I find that formal grammar instruction is essential to an extent. Looking back on my experience of learning grammar growing up, a majority of my paper’s grades rode on the back of my grammar instead of the main idea of the paper itself. I myself have never been very good at grammar and I’ve had teachers try to drill it into my brain since 1st grade. So to go from that, I don’t think formal grammar instruction is going to be fully absorbed even when it is being repeatedly taught throughout a person’s life. I think the best way to truly learn grammar is to write consistently and have someone with experience look through it and help you correct it. I think that in the classroom grammar is important as a writer is learning because it establishes an idea on how to form something together that will make sense but I think that some are far more harsh about grammar than they need to be. My Junior year of high school, 90% of my papers were graded based on grammar. This sucked because I would work so hard on my point in the paper and the teacher completely ignored it and just focused on technical pieces. Overall, I think that grammar should be taught as a guideline that escalates based on experience instead of a rubric or set bar.