In a post last week I argued that lessons in formal grammar aren’t helpful to students who need to sharpen their writing skills. In my opinion, usage is the way to go.
A good friend emailed me to say that she generally agreed with me, with one exception: You need grammatical theory and terminology to teach commas.
I say she’s wrong, and I’m going to use the topic of restrictive and non-restrictive clauses to make my point.
Any English teacher will tell you that these terms are a nightmare to teach. (I used to struggle with them myself until I found an easier way.)
Here’s the thing, though: you hear these sentences done correctly in conversation all the time – and the people constructing them aren’t whizzes at grammar. Read these three sentences aloud as you listen to what your voice is doing:
- Uncle Gary, who was a baseball star in college, can give you some tips about pitching.
- Cars that are parked overnight may be ticketed and towed.
- This assignment, which seemed impossible at first, turned out to be easy and fun.
Your voice automatically went down when you came to “who” in Sentence 1 and “which” in Sentence 3 – and then back up near the end of the sentence. But your voice didn’t change in Sentence 2. (Amazing, isn’t it? You learned to do that as a child!)
So (radical idea!) – couldn’t students in a writing class learn to insert those commas the same way? Say the sentence aloud, listen to your voice, and insert the punctuation.
But can teachers really do that?
Yes. I did it with students for years. I had students practice speaking these sentences in groups and pairs. Then I passed out strips of paper (I always carried plenty of them with me to class) and had students work together to write and punctuate their sentences.
It helped that I always made a point of using lots of these sentences myself as I was teaching (with an exaggerated voice change). For example: “Your homework, should you choose to accept it, is to complete Exercise 2 on page 15.”
Doesn’t it make sense to build on what students already know about language? None of this is new to them, folks. Why make writing so @#$%! difficult? Life is hard enough!
(I always used a clip from the old Superman show to teach these commas. Click here to learn more. Go to http://bit.ly/EasyCommas to download a free handout that explains commas – without grammatical jargon.)