Reflection - analysis...

Grammar B: Un-grammar breaking all the rules

Grammar. Ugh. I myself have never been a fan of teaching or learning grammar and while I was in high school I never learned grammar in my English classes. I learned it in French class and later had my comma use ripped to shreds in freshmen comp class at the University of Arizona. While reading Romano’s Writing with Passion: Life stories, multiple genres, I found myself intrigued by Romano’s discussion of “Grammar B.” Seeing as I have always been puzzled by grammar and I find it extremely difficult to teach grammar, “Grammar B” sounded like a fascinating solution. “Grammar B breaks the rules of standard written English as a means of communicating powerfully. And it does this breaking, altering, and smashing with panache”(Romano 75).
I really enjoyed that Grammar B gave the students so much freedom to express themselves outside of what can be a very stifling convention. I think that it would give students the ability to find their voice and meaningfully break the rules. I always try to teach my students to use repetition to prove their points and “in Grammar B, repetition takes on even more importance. Grammar B, Weathers tells us, uses repetition ‘to achieve a kind of momentum in composition’ (1980, 28)” (Romano 79). I think this is true; repetition builds power and easy structure for students to follow.
Sentence fragments and labyrinthine sentences I believe to be troublesome for low functioning students like the ones I teach. As discussed earlier, knowing convention first is paramount to being able to manipulate these alternative methods. I think that sentence fragments are useful for creating or breaking rhythm in a piece of writing when a student is conscious that he/she is doing it. However, when a student writes using sentence fragments naturally and doesn’t understand why it isn’t a complete sentence, then encouraging the use of fragments is not going to help them grow as writers at this point in their careers. Although on the opposite end of the spectrum as Romano states, “At the opposite end of the sentence-length continuum from the fragment is the labyrinthine sentence-not the lawless, poorly punctuated run-on sentence, but a finely crafted aggregation of words that weaves in and out, accruing information, riding rhythms of parallel sentence structure, tacking on phrases, clauses, and grammatical absolutes to form a sinuous sentence perfectly suited for some things we might describe or discuss”(Romano 81). I agree again, but my students more often then not write those loose run-on sentences that he discusses above. I feel that teaching lower functioning students these skills is extremely optimistic and difficult.
One type of writing that Romano mentions however, that I think could be of use to my students is the list writing. I find that my students can articulate their thoughts well in lists, even meaningful lists. “A list allows a writer quickly to confront readers with abundant detail, enabling them to see an untainted, holistic picture. In list making, syntax and logical connections of language are not important. Simple, unexplained, occasionally poetic, the list usually appears in a column, one item per line, much like a grocery list” (Romano 87). This is within my students’ attention span. I think that I can teach my students to make meaningful lists that can later lead to meaningful prose. We were working on a picture book in my freshmen class for last marking period and part of that assignment was to create lists that help them explain their high school experience. It was a success. The students created lists about: their schedules, their preparation and their understanding of new subject matter. It is amazing to see the power of such short work that they were able to grasp immediately.
I like the ideas about double voice and the multi-genre research, but I’m unsure of how practical this would be in my school. I think that I could teach a simplified version of both using some real world models of movies and other authors much like Romano did with Billy the Kid. My students do like using mentor pieces, so if I had a strong model to show them and I broke down the project into an entire term, I do believe that my students could create a less complicated version of what his seniors came up with. I was extremely impressed with the John Lennon project and found myself thinking that it would be amazing to read a class full of different interpretations of research as opposed to laboring over boring conventional research papers that are predominantly plagiarized. All things considered, I found Romano’s text to be somewhat liberated and hopeful for the future. I would be eager to try some of his techniques with more advanced writers and even more interested to see what kinds of questions and writings my students would grapple with.

Work Cited
Romano, Tom. Writing with Passion: Life stories, multiple genres. Portsmith, New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1995.