"The sentence which is spliced together out of the ‘parts of speech’ is, in truth, no sentence at all. It is not language any more than a company drill is fighting, or a scarecrow a man. Thought which is living, growing, organic in structure, cannot be conveyed or represented by a lifeless, static, artificial construction. Nor are we studying language by studying such a construction. The sentences which grammar presents to us have in very truth ceased to be language, once they have been cut off from all reference to the various acts of thought-communication which gave rise to them, so that they seem to exist in and for themselves, mere mechanical congeries of words, brought together only to fulfill certain arbitrary requirements of the sentence form as such" (Buck 148-9).
The above quotation comes form Gertrude Buck's 1909 article "Make-Believe Grammar." It may seem a bit random to post a 100 year old quote about grammar instruction on the WC's blog, but as I was rereading it today it reminded me of a session I had yesterday. The tutee was from South Korea and was here to go through a COMM paper with the standard desire for grammar and clarity advice that most of my ESL sessions consist of. As we came towards the end of the paper, I threw out a "comma here before the 'but'" and was startled when she asked why. She explained why she believed there should not be a comma there and it made good sense to me, making me question if my ideas on commas were true or if I've been secretly giving bad advice for years now.
So when I read this passage, it reminded me of not only this grammatical dilema of yesterday, but also it brought up the way in which I go about punctuating my own writing. Where I physically hear a pause or a breath is where I put my comma (I know, I know, there can totally be problems with this approach). It flows organically and is almost a literal life-breath to the words I type or write, especially in my freewriting and journaling. Wouldn't it be nice if all punctuation could move as effortlessly as that living comma?
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I've been thinking alot about this too Nikki. I have, in fact been regularly cracking my old beaten-yet-beloved copy of Warriner's English Grammar, because I can't find ways to explain why my "sounding right" is more correct than anyone else's (and I'm sure it isn't). I've been reading George Campbell lately, too:
ReplyDelete"Language is a species of fashion, established by consent of the people of a particular country. Grammar gives not law to language, but from speech derives authority and value" (!)
Ok, fine, George and Gertrude, fine. I'm with you. But I've have maybe been liberated from rules and regulations for so long (grammar books have no authority over ME, thanks very much. If I or my students have effectively communicated than its fine. When was the last time I really worried about it?), that I've been enthralled with the re-aquaintance of how useful a functioning set of rules can be. I have actually been *diagramming sentences* in class on the blackboard. I know, I know, I've gone starkers. But it makes visible in a completely accessible way exactly why a dangling participle sounds wrong, and an incomplete sentence is incomplete. I recently saw a sign on a door at another school that said "Prof. So&So's Art of English Grammar course is cancelled for today" and felt a visceral pang to be in that class...
Was the "but" being used as a coordinating conjunction? That's easy enough to explain. . .
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