Again and again, I witnessed aspiration gave way to discouragement. (The national average is only marginally better at roughly 80 percent.) A primary culprit: the required developmental writing classes that focused on traditional grammar instruction. These students are victims of the mistaken belief that grammar lessons must come before writing, rather than grammar being something that is best learned through writing. I saw the high cost of this phenomenon first-hand at the urban community college where I taught writing for eight years, an institution where more than 90 percent of students failed to complete a two-year degree within three years.

We need to teach students how to write grammatically by letting them write. Significantly, this sometimes-debilitating focus on “the rules” can be found in students who attended elite private institutions as well as those from resource-strapped public schools. They report thoughts like “Is this right? Is that right?” and “Oh my god, if I write a contraction, I’m going to flunk.” Focused on being correct, they never give themselves a chance to explore their ideas or ways of expressing those ideas. In my work with adults who dropped out of school before earning a college degree, I have found over and over again that they over-edit themselves from the moment they sit down to write. There is a real cost to ignoring such findings.

The result: No significant differences among the three groups-except that both grammar groups emerged with a strong antipathy to English.

For example, one well-regarded study followed three groups of students from 9th to 11th grade where one group had traditional rule-bound lessons, a second received an alternative approach to grammar instruction, and a third received no grammar lessons at all, just more literature and creative writing. This finding-confirmed in 1984, 2007, and 2012 through reviews of over 250 studies-is consistent among students of all ages, from elementary school through college. Yes, they need to learn grammar, but the old-fashioned way does not work. A century of research shows that traditional grammar lessons-those hours spent diagramming sentences and memorizing parts of speech-don’t help and may even hinder students’ efforts to become better writers.

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