chapter 9: writing and grammar

To understand the basics for applying grammatical concepts to the writing that you do every day, you need to begin with a clear understanding of your own writing process and how an understanding of grammatical  concepts can help you develop effective strategies for  editing that writing. To begin, recall the model for the writing process:

As we described in the introduction, we will not consider grammar as a part of invention, planning, or drafting. Instead we will examine the role grammar might play in the revision and editing stages of the writing process. While revision and editing are part of the larger writing  process, each of these components can be thought of as a process in and  of itself. As part of your development for understanding and applying  grammatical concepts to the writing that you do every day, this page  describes strategies that grow out of the study of language in the  context of writing and writing instruction. To critically review a document effectively, we want to  build on a method of “top-down” editing developed by Dr. Patricia  Sullivan at Purdue University. For our purposes, and to stay consistent with our approach in this textbook, we have reconfigured it slightly as a revision flowchart. But the method itself clearly comes from Dr. Sullivan’s original idea. This revision flowchart provides a structured  routine for inspecting documents in a more comprehensive manner. The goal of the process is to assist you in both identifying and fixing problems in the text that are most  likely to interfere with a reader’s comprehension. Graphically, the revision flowchart looks like this:

To perform top-down editing, as this flowchart indicates,

• Attend to the document-level problems first
• Work on the section-level problems second
• Reshape the paragraph-level issues and address sentence-level problems third
• Check for transitions between sections and overall context-making
• Do a final proofreading pass

In general, reviewing your writing can be approached on the different levels at which the document can be improved.

• Revision = re-vision = addressing changes at the global level = higher-order concerns
• Editing = addressing changes at the surface level (sentence, phrase, word) = lower-order concerns
• Proofreading = making changes to spelling and punctuation = always the last, separate step.

When revising and editing your paper, not every element of  your work should have equal priority. The most important parts of your  paper—often called “Higher-Order Concerns”—are the “big picture”  elements. After you have addressed these more important elements, you  can turn your attention to the “Lower-Order Concerns,” which include  grammatical concepts and punctuation. We will not review higher-order concern strategies, but will focus here on how you can more effectively examine a text at the editing stage for lower-order concerns, which primarily include:

• Sentence Patterns
• Linguistic Style
• Sentence Structure
• Punctuation
• Word Choice
• Pronouns
• Transitional Words
• Spelling

At the editing stage, you begin by checking that your  information is arranged appropriately and that sentence constructions do  not pose a barrier to your reader understanding the message. Your  initial review at this stage should begin with the following goals:

• Ensure that paragraphs highlight main idea and are logically ordered
• Ensure that sentences are varied
• Ensure that sentences are clear and concise

To meet these editing goals, you should first develop paragraph-level strategies to ensure that

• each paragraph connects to the main point
• the topic of the paragraph is the subject of most sentences in that paragraph

Second, develop sentence-level editing strategies for

• appropriate use of sentence variety, based on an understanding of genre, purpose, and audience
• rhetorically sound and consistent use of the active and passive 
• accurate and consistent use of punctuation 
• avoidance of sentence fragments and dangling or misplaced modifiers
• appropriate use of the main verb phrase 

This should include a close read for generally sloppy mistakes, such as

• non-parallel structures
• gratuitous repetition
• inconsistent reference to terms/people/ideas
• misspellings

Third, develop proofreading strategies as a final review  before submission. The key is to find one that you are comfortable with,  such as

• Review once in reverse, from end to beginning, line by line, focusing on punctuation 
• Scan the whole text for one or two issues at a time (requires re-reading several times) 
• Review whole text for known problem areas first 
• Read aloud to identify subject-verb disagreement, non-parallel constructions, choppy sentences, sentence fragments 
• Review in chunks, by section or by paragraph, with breaks in between 
• Proofread a hard copy, not on screen

In short, you should set extra time aside to edit effectively. As you consider the concepts described in this textbook, you should begin to develop and apply strategies for editing your writing in the future. Finally, we want to emphasize that these editing strategies  should be applied at the END of the process, and only AFTER you have  attended to the higher-order concerns, which should begin with general  considerations:

• Making context and purposes explicit
• Highlighting conclusions and major evidence
• Providing visual and verbal roadmaps for readers
• Meeting reader’s needs/expectations for this type of document

and then focus your higher-order review more specifically on

• Thesis or focus
• Audience and purpose
• Organization
• Development
• Coherence
• Repetition of a Key Term or Phrase

The overall strength of your writing will always be your  ability to articulate your purpose clearly, offer a coherent argument,  provide appropriate and necessary support for your claims, and connect  to your readers in both explicit and implicit ways. Understanding  grammatical concepts can help make your writing appear better, but grammatically correct and perfectly punctuated sentences alone will not  make a good piece of writing.   

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chapter 9: introduction

This chapter situates grammar within the writing process and promotes grammar from a rhetorical perspective. In this way, the use of grammar and the stylistic choices that writers make are always rhetorical. Writing is both cognitive process and social practice. As a practice, writing is developmental and recursive. The practice of writing is most often  characterized as a process, series of discrete steps: invention, planning,  drafting, revising, and editing. 

While we won’t go into the detail here about why these steps are not necessarily discrete and why this process is rarely linear, we will point out that there is only one place for the effective use of grammar and punctuation in this model: the editing stage. All the other stages are more concerned with higher-order thinking and getting words on the page. All the other stages are, for the most part, internal. The editing stage, however, is the last stage before publication or submission, the last stage before the document is formally shared with an audience.

While we might use grammar to a lesser extent at the other stages (as normal language use for writing), the developing of text does not need to be grammatically correct until we submit it to readers for their review and evaluation.

We don’t use grammar to come up with ideas for writing (as in invention), nor do we use grammar to plan and organize our document (as in planning). Grammar plays a minor role when we draft because our text needs to be understandable even to ourselves, but we don’t need grammatically correct sentences to write a first draft. Similarly, the revision stage should focus on higher-order concerns, such as thesis or focus, audience, purpose, organization, and development. While grammar can play a stylistic role as we re-see our text, even this is late-stage revision and serves primarily to add complexity to our delivery and to the development of our ideas.

In other words, learning grammar can help you understand the depth of language and its inherent complexity, and learning grammar will help you punctuate your sentences more effectively, but good punctuation does not mean good writing, or that your writing is clear or well-constructed.

As social practice, writing is the complex interactions of writer, reader, text, and context. Once again, grammar has a place in each of these interactions, but grammar should by no means be the primary consideration in your thinking. As a writer, you may have a heightened awareness of language use and correctness if you are writing for a particular reader who might be hyperconscious of grammar, like an English teacher or a hyper-correcter. You might be more conscious of grammar and punctuation if the text needs to be especially clear, like a set of life-saving instructions or a contract. Grammar may have a more prominent place in a particular context, like your job application materials or a formal essay in a literature class. The point is that grammar should play a role in your thinking, but grammar is only one consideration among many for a writer, and while it may be an important consideration, it should never be the primary consideration.

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chapter 8: introduction

This chapter begins to situate grammar and punctuation within the writing process and promotes grammar from a rhetorical perspective. For too long  people have mischaracterized grammar and punctuation as rigid and prescriptive, something mysterious (possibly magical), and that a knowledge of “grammar” somehow transcends all other language considerations, especially in writing and writing instruction. For us, grammar and punctuation has a place in  writing and writing instruction, but grammar is NOT writing and writing  instruction. There are many who would like to believe that grammar is a single, unchanging entity: that the grammar and punctuation of American English is the same as it has always been and will be the same on into the future. But language  is a messy business, constantly in flux, constantly changing for good  and for ill. But, because most of us want stability in our language,  this messiness leads some to mystify grammar and punctuation: something we believe but  cannot articulate, something to apply based on a “gut feeling,”  something we leave to the experts and the pedants. Many of us learned our first grammar lessons at home, informal as  most of them probably were: “Don’t say ain’t!” “Don’t use contractions!”  But these lessons were too often inconsistent both in delivery and in  usage. Our next exposure to grammar came in elementary school: formal,  acontextual forays doing battle with worksheets and deciphering the red-inked code of the teacher-expert scratched across our (often  first-draft) writing assignments. As we moved into junior and senior  high school, the mystery of grammar and punctuation became deeper and more complex,  especially as our own language use became more informal and much  different from those of our parents’ generation. The answers to all of  our grammar and punctuation questions always seemed to be just out of our grasp, even  though the teacher (that shaman) seemingly had the answers we so  desperately desired hidden within that red pen. And grammar and punctuation became the  most important consideration in our writing lives because grammar and punctuation seemed  to always be the focus of comments on our writing. But once again,  these lessons were too often inconsistent both in delivery and in usage. As the authors of this textbook, we believe that the basis of this  mystery occurs, unfortunately, because over the years too many of our  English teachers at the primary and secondary level have had too little  training in writing instruction and too little training in grammar and punctuation instruction. But they were still expected to be the expert in the  classroom, and this expertise was delivered with a certainty borne from  position rather than understanding.  To complicate matters further for the English teacher, responding to  student writing is a complex enterprise. Responding to one student paper  is hard work. When you multiply that times 150 papers, day in and day  out, teachers have always looked to simplify their lives. Thus  responding to student writing became dependent on the mystery of grammar and punctuation because grammar and punctuation, inexplicably, made the teacher’s response to writing  easier, and seemingly more concrete: 

• Dangling modifier = -3 points
• Comma splice = -2 points
• Misspelled word = -1 point

In other words, grammar and punctuation appears objective; grammar and punctuation appears explicit;  grammar and punctuation makes the response to writing quantitative and scientific. A  writing teacher can find as many grammar and punctuation errors as  necessary, assign a numerical value to each, and give the paper a score.  Unfortunately, this allowed teachers to avoid the messy,  time-consuming, difficult (and subjective) scoring that comes with  responding to higher-order issues in writing. Therefore, in this way,  grammar and punctuation has become synonymous with writing for far too many people  across the country. This leads to a key misrepresentation of grammar and punctuation: learning grammar and punctuation makes you a better writer. For this false claim (and others), grammar and punctuation has  been exalted among the practices of writing, placed on high without  evidence or reason. But we make no false promises. This chapter will further your understanding of the complexity of language and the various grammatical and punctuation choices amidst that complexity. This chapter, in particular, will help you understand how to punctuate correctly (what the choices  are and why one choice is more correct than another). But it will not, alone, make you a better “writer.” To be a better  writer, you need to understand, both practically and  theoretically, a wide range of writerly skills that go far beyond mere grammar and punctuation.    

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