David McCalmon

Grammanalysis

Using Grammar to Practice Critical Thinking

Whereas most the of the U.S. has let grammar fall out of their curricula, I see grammar not just as a way to teach “proper” (and effective) syntax and sentence patterns, but as a way to generate analytical thinking. I use the neologism of “grammanalysis” to encapsulate my approach to using grammar to learn analysis. Students contend with choice as they decide where to situate words in relation to one another to achieve potent effect. 

The teaching of grammar in the contemporary United States has been thrown out because, rightly, I think, teachers realize that teaching one hegemonic style of syntax perpetuates a system of white privilege and essentialism. For this reason, I do not grade on grammar in my students’ writing. 

However, as students enter into a world whose hegemony is still white, patriarchal, and privileged along these lines, I believe it a disservice to avoid teaching them to “speak” this language — only by knowing the language can they explode it from the inside with new ideas that challenge the status quo. Most minority students are familiar with the concept of having to be, in a sense, “bilingual,” to speak a variation of dialect they grew up with at home and another at school or work that fits the dominant social strata. Rather than leave them unequipped to write at a high level inside the expectations of this dominant system, I seek to give them the tools to write within it, to dismantle it through awareness of it, to discard it as the occasion calls, and to incorporate their own grammatical backgrounds in using it. In thinking of “proper” English grammar as one more state of being that students can inhabit and move out of at will, grammar becomes a tool of analysis in another way: it prompts students to make choices at the micro level of the sentence as well as the macro level of their existence in the world, engaging with a potentially dangerous reality in order to find freedom from and through it: Grammanalysis teaches students how to think critically for themselves  inside the writing process and beyond.