The one thing everyone is concerned about. Writing panics/crisis always revolve around the idea that students do not write proper grammar.

The belief that it can be easily fixed.

A commonplace assumption: the isolation of error will show someone to not repeat that error again

Learning by mechanics (teacher corrections, drills, tests). If mechanics are as successful as people believe, why do we still make grammatical errors? Who does not make errors?

Who makes errors?

• Faigley (531): The image of the lone genius inherited from Romantic idealism (materializes in writing instruction in the ’60s). A lone genius must be able to master it all, including grammar.
• Macrorie: The one not in the seminar. See Faigley on feedback loop (533) and Sommers.
• Williams (407): The one who the reader believes made an error.
• Faigley (536): The student who does not see writing as always being in relation to previous texts.
• The one whose work is appropriated by the teacher and made into error (Sommers).

What do we talk about when we talk about grammar?

• let’s hear narratives of grammar (my teaching community college drills)
• tales of marking up
• rules we agree on?
• where did we learn - assuming we know grammar well

Things to take with us:

• Hartwell: the meta issues/practices
• Williams: the problems with identifying grammar mistakes; what is idiosyncratic/ what interferes with meaning
• Macrorie: seminar style
• Sommers: levels of response/types of response
• Faigley: extending notions of process/even grammar must be seen in social context: “Answers to such questions will come only when we look beyond who is writing to whom to the texts and social systems that stand in relation to the act of writing” (539)

What do we mean when we say “meta” or “social” in the context of grammar?

The question of overall relationship. What relates to what else in a given piece of writing. Notice that none of the readings dismiss the teaching of grammar. How, when put together, do they give insight regarding how to approach grammar?

There is a social nature to writing (Faigley) which does not mean people as much as it means relationships.

• Use the readings to construct a guide for meta/social pedagogy regarding grammar instruction
• Turn Nancy Sommer’s and Lester Faigley’s (with a nod to Macrorie’s seminar) essays into a set of instructions for conducing a grammar oriented peer review.

In other words, we can write our own grammar guides based on what we’ve read.

If in doubt, do a Google search. Who teaches grammar/mechanics in the ways our readings recommend? Is there any documented evidence on the Web?

And if not, what kind of challenges must we meet?

Hartwell
Grammar as commonplace

Other level of convention: Grammar usage.
But from start, hartwell uses word “complicated” something Bartho does not
426 set of questions
430 internalized grammar – you know but don’t know the rule
432 relevance of “degree of literacy” which basically means “ degree of recognition of convention” no?
[though notice the levels of “exception Hartwell must point out over and over regarding conventional usage]

438 problem of asking writers to behave in ways MATURE (or normal writers) don’t. Here the example is testing a sentence.

439 importance of meta work

442 two proposals: context and meta
443 no relationship b/w grammar and logic

The different levels of grammar, but overall it’s a call for a meta-writing/understanding of one’s writing – not one or the other – grammar and content..
A challenge to conventional wisdom that testing reduces error
Knowing rules already (inherent model) or learning them? What other grammars do we already know (I’m thinking of digital ones here) grammar is punctuation. Spelling, sentence structure. What else? Isn’t grammar organizing language?
426 – go over these questions – especially first two

difference b/w grammar and usage?

429 – internalization of grammar –What grammars do you internalize?
441 - notes print – Print creates grammar. Leads to the standard practices of literacy. What does new media create?

And the Grammar 2 is really the rules we don’t learn.

What are the “rules” we need? We internalize?

Williams
405 differences in HOW we perceive error and example 408
407 being unreflective when discussing error (see Hartwell for meta)
409 what amounts to “noticing”
usage can triumph the noticing
412 how to consider error then?
Response at level of violation and if we should respond
417 must adjust how we notice error

Greatest lesson of this essay? It’s place in a keywords discussion?

There is the gotcha mentality here – at level of critique but also itself is a gotcha. Another commonplace: student grading is a gotcha process.

Sommers
352 imagining readers’ responses
353 comments produce revision
354 teacher appropriates student writing!
355 the fixed texts (error correction) vs open (content)
355 the fixed issue gets students to think that the text is finished with exception of a few changes
356 comments as commonplace assumptions

358 reading student text like literary text – for meaning, not error

354 the difference b/w edit and compose…textbooks call “edit” error hunting/corrections. But edit isn’t that…to be an editor is more…
question of message?
Student -> text (something lost in meaning)
Teacher -> student (ditto)

What are her strategies?

Faigley
Expressivism/cognitive/social
527 we have internalized process
we’re returning here to a key word from Harris (and we also see elsewhere the other keywords).
What can we learn from this return and how it juxtaposes with Harris (process as the responses to other writings/ideas)
Harris is closer to what Faigley calls the social view – 535 – society shapes language. Only, at the rhetorical level, a variety of social forces shapes a given text or idea.
A different meaning of community – then. Not “living together” but a space where sociality occurs (the forming of relations)
539 – very important conclusion – texts and social systems stand in relationship to writing
what are some of these?
And a part of the process all positions forget: the exigence – that which gets us to write (here, it is Giroux who prompts Faigley) – what do we pose as exigence

what is the exigence for grammar?

Macrorie

207 technology (even in 1960) and writing

the nonlinear

writing is a way of seeing yourself coming back

208 if we don’t realize writing is dying, it will die

freshmen writing is killing writing

good writing means getting criticism/ not staying in margins

TEACH freshmen writing like a SEMINAR

not as correction

209 criticism also means bad criticism

210 but you can’t address punctuation, grammar until the writer wants to write