week three: organic grammar

How do I explain my feelings about grammar? Personally, I love words. I love stringing them together, playing with them, forming them into sentences, both layered and simple, that not only express my meaning but look and sound beautiful. I know that good grammar is essential to good writing; even when I as a writer choose to break standard constructs, I'm doing it with intention and specific purpose. Most of all, I appreciate reading authors who really know how to use words to elevate their stories from simple narrative into something...more. Last month's issue of The Believer included a great tribute to the sentence, words, language, and (conveniently) revision--"The Sentence Is A Lonely Place" by Gary Lutz. He says it better than I can:

...what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” The writers of such sentences became the writers I read and reread. I favored books that you could open to any page and find in every paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.

Haven't you ever done that? Stopped in the middle of a novel just to appreciate the words themselves, the way they sit next to each other on the page, the way they build in anticipation, the way they sound in your mouth?

What terrifies me is how I will ever communicate this feeling to adolescents. I don't think it's something that was ever taught to me, so how will I teach it to others?

But I think if I look at the writing process as just that, a process, and grammar as another part of it, I am less intimidated. What Lutz touches on at the end of that excerpt is something that every article we read for this week emphasized--revision is essential for good writing, and by necessity good grammar. The rest of his article is given to careful dissection of specific sentences--why this word here, how that vowel impacts that consonant. I don't think we'll get to that level with our students, but the point--that careful attention must be paid--is so relevant.

I have never experienced the kind of total revision that Fulwiler talks about in his article, but after reading the transformations of the sample essays I am convinced. The idea of limiting the possibilities to set the writing free (like when Fulwiler asks his students to focus on one day, one setting) makes sense, especially for adolescents who seem to need limits sometimes to focus their thinking. The tools Harper provides to focus on specific elements, like internal thought, action, etc., seem like another great way for students to gain a tangible understanding of some rather difficult, abstract ideas, during the writing process.

Drawing all this together, it makes complete sense to me to include grammar organically in the writing and revision process. If we ask students to pay attention to their words, they will understand why grammar is important (to communicate meaning)--a feat that is never accomplished by diagramming sentences on the board. As the students grow, as they write more and more, their grammar skills become embedded in their cognitive and critical thinking skills, their expressive abilities and word play.

When I read Gary Lutz's article a few weeks ago I thought the whole time of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek--my favorite book of sentences. When I loaned my copy to a friend (written in, dog-earred, water-damaged, food-stained), he made fun of me for loving such a la-ti-da piece of nonsense, but whatever. He's a lawyer, I'm an English teacher, enough said. Her sentences are bold and over the top and make fearless declarations about the world and her place in it. I read them over and over.

And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish as of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys. If I am a maple key falling, at least I can twirl.

LINK

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves PUNCTUATION GAME! Warning: trickier than it looks.