M. Renee Benham
September 4, 2012
Writing Construct Proposal
“The
majesty and grandeur of the English language; It’s the greatest possession we
have.”[1]
At least, that’s what Professor Henry Higgins told Eliza while drilling “The
rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain” at one in the morning. Eliza believed his statement and mastery of “correct”
language changed her life. In American
schools, the rules of punctuation and grammar are drilled into our supple young
minds until we can repeat them well enough to pass into the next grade. In college applications, job resumes, and
those ghastly computer-skills tests applicants must pass before even being
considered for state employment, the rules of grammar haunt us. Yet what if the entire subject of grammar is
a construct? Elizabeth Wardle and Doug
Downs define constructs as “mental frameworks that people build in order to
make sense of the world around them. One of the key features of an effective
construct is that it quickly begins to seem “natural” or inevitable, rather
than made-up” (35). What if none of it
really matters? John Dawkins writes that
“what ‘good writers’ do, writers like Orwell, is punctuate according to their
intended meaning, their intended audience” (141). He suggests that the “rules” should be more like
the pirates code, providing guidelines that are only sometimes followed, if it
suits the situation (Dawkins 142). As
long as correct meaning is conveyed, perhaps a double parallelism and subject-verb
disagreement is not the end of the world.
Yet we have to draw the line somewhere, don’t we? We cannot simply start wandering around
making up words and ignoring punctuation willy-nilly. For starters, I won’t understand you. And the loss of understanding would negate the
entire purpose of standardized grammar. I
argue that, as a freshman composition teacher, I need to teach my students the
value and benefits of standardized (MLA) grammar and punctuation guidelines,
while simultaneously challenging the common belief that good grammar denotes
good writing and encouraging their creativity to write as “good writers”
do.
