Tip of the Week: Parse, Parse, Parse? No, No, No.
In last week’s Tip of the Week, I suggested that improvement in writing is often “caught” by continuous exposure to good writers. However, at a basic level you may be asking, can a student’s grammar be improved through direct teaching? I would answer yes, but not as a result of the common methods you find in many grammar books. I’m referring to the endless diagramming and labeling tasks students face every day.
Should students be able to identify the parts of speech, to know if a word is a noun, adjective, or adverb? Of course! To talk about the words in a sentence and how they function, a common working vocabulary, particular to grammar, is absolutely essential. But, knowing grammatical terms and being able to apply them to words in a sentence doesn’t necessarily translate into making your student a better writer.
There is a method which we utilize in our product, Grammar Bytes, that takes a student’s knowledge of grammar and applies it in such a way that improvement in writing is likely to take place. Grammar Bytes is made up of twenty-one exercises that engage students to use their knowledge of grammar to solve puzzles, identify missing words in short stories, and write creatively according to a prescribed grammatical pattern. It’s this grammatical pattern part of Grammar Bytes that takes a student’s knowledge of grammar and transforms it into a useful writing tool.
Grammar was never meant to be an end in itself – the parse, parse, parse drumbeat of most grammar workbooks. No, it should be seen as a means to an end – better written expression.
Don’t simply parse, parse, parse. Make your focus, write, write, write!
That’s the tip of the week!
Curt Bumcrot, MRE
