America the Grammarless: Wishy-Washy. Not all the Grammar Stains Came Out Mom!

After reading America the Grammarless by David Mulroy, my first inclination is to play the Devil's Advocate. No doubt, as college students the default mechanism in all of us should be to read every essay put before us with hyper-critical lenses. Queerly enough, I am also taking a Persuasion/Logic course that enlightened my eyes to some logical errors in Mulroy's piece, America the Grammarless. For the sake of brevity, I will number my arguments against Mulroy's piece.



1. "Grammatical terms are part of an orderly set of concepts that describe the organizational features of all intelligible speech and writing" (3).



1a. Indeed, one needs these terms. Analogously, the mason needs bricks to build the wall, so a student needs grammatical terms to structure sentences, paragraphs, essays, etcetera. But I also need to learn how to properly fit these bricks (terms) together. Mulroy's position seems as if the "bricks" are more important than the skill?



2. "...association [the NCTE] of English teachers has been urging its members for decades to pay less attention to formal instruction in grammar lends credence to the widespread impression that our students' understanding of that subject is at an all-time low" (4).



2a. Okay. If all these teachers of English (secondary, post-secondary alike) concur that less attention to grammar helps the over-all writing process, then is Mulroy's mind far better?

2b. And, is there a difference between instruction in grammar vs. formal instruction in grammar? Maybe the NCTE is opposed to lower based cognitive exercises that perpetuate rote memory skills, which is a good pedagogy.



3. "...the assertion that instruction in grammar hurts composition is, in practice, the same as saying that it should not be taught all" (6).



3a. Is it? Of course not! The NCTE is just trying to adhere to a new teaching strategy.



4. Mulroy stretches the gamit when he hypothesizes that the adult literacy performance in the U.S. is weakened by the neglect of grammar (9).



4a I'm really astounded by this argument. Essentially, Mulroy is saying that the BIGGEST factor toward the delinquency in literacy in the sixties and seventies was, are you ready: Anti-grammar policies. What about socio-economic factors, cultural revolutions (increased drug use included), the Vietnam War, etc. Im sure, statistically, I could theorize a plethora of problems that affected literacy levels.



5. "The clearest evidence of a problem in language arts instruction may lie in the well-known decline in the nation's SAT scores" (10).



5a. The SAT doesn't even deal with grammar:



http://www.sparknotes.com/testprep/books/sat/chapter1section1.html



The Verbal Questions
The SAT contains a total of 78 verbal questions, divided into three types. All three types are multiple-choice.
Sentence completions (19 questions). You are given a sentence with one or two blanks and must choose the best word or words to fill the blanks.
Analogies (19). You are given two words that are related in some way and must choose the word pair that shares the same relation.
Reading comprehension (40). These questions test your ability to read and understand facts and arguments based on a reading passage.



5a. (cont.) Come one, really. Mulroy suggests that since grammar is being avoided in grade school, SAT participants are getting low scores in reading. Again, this is a logical fallacy. There could be a wide range of problems that suggest otherwise: poor study habits, poverty, abscence of reading programs. Should I go on?



In closing, Mulroy's heart is in the right place, but his scientific methodology is not. In fact, the whole essay is littered with logical inconsistencies that create a piece that is hard to accept. It would be quite a challenge to find anyone that does not believe grammar is unimportant (myself included), but lower order concerns like comma use, fragments and capitalization are not nearly as important as higher order concerns.