By Margaret Lucke

It’s September (already!), and as I watch the neighborhood kids head back to school I find myself thinking about the lessons I learned early on that led to my becoming a writer. Specifically, grammar lessons.

Writers love words—their sound, their rhythm, their layers of straightforward and subtle meanings.  Words are our paint and brushes. We use them not just to tell stories, but to give our ideas color, shape, substance, and texture. Words are the magic wands we wave to bring characters to life, to set a plot into motion.

We adore words.

But grammar? Not so much.

The problem is that people tend to think of grammar as rules that seem arbitrary and arcane terms that they can’t remember. Participle, subjunctive case, subordinate clause—arrgh! Who cares?

Do I reveal myself as a hopeless nerd if I confess that I find grammar fun? No, I can’t define subjunctive case without looking it up. But that’s not the point. Grammar isn’t really about rules and labels. It’s the anatomy of the language, the essential connective tissue that binds our wonderful words into coherent and meaningful patterns. Without grammar, what we write makes no sense.

One of the most useful things I learned in school was how to diagram a sentence. Seriously! It was like I’d finally cracked a code. Gertrude Stein probably was exaggerating when she said, “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences,” but not by much.

When I tell people this, they laugh at me or groan. Or else they look at me blankly, especially the young ones. Apparently this valuable skill isn’t taught much in English classes these days.

I haven’t actually diagrammed a sentence in years, but I’m glad I learned how. It made me understand of how the parts of a sentence fit together—how the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. It taught me where to put the commas, how to keep my modifiers from dangling, and how to arrange my words so that a sentence means what I intend it to.

Other than that one lesson, formal grammar instruction is pretty useless. I have scientific proof. In ninth grade I was part of the Great Grammar Experiment.

My school district developed, at great expense, a language skills curriculum using a fancy instructional methodology called programmed learning. The theory, based on the experiments of the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, was that presenting the material in lessons with small, sequential steps and rewarding correct responses quickly would reinforce the mastery of the material.

For the pilot test, two English classes at my school were selected to be the guinea pigs. For twenty minutes every day, kids in the first class trudged through the special set of grammar drills.

The second class was the control group. Its students weren’t taught grammar at all. Instead they read lots of stories and essays and turned in weekly writing assignments.

In September, January, and June, both classes took standardized tests that measured their ability to use grammar correctly. You can guess the result:  To the dismay of school officials, all of that drilling made no discernible difference for the hapless class upon which it had been inflicted. But the readers and writers had developed a strong sense of how language works. Their scores improved by leaps and bounds.

The expensive program was scrapped.

I’m grateful to this day that I was in the second class.