Style and Grammar
When you think of your prior experiences receiving critiques of your writing, especially in school settings, perhaps your first thought may be the marks and corrections to your sentences—words crossed out or re-spelled, commas inserted, letters capitalized, etc. Perhaps you felt as though your sentences were dipped in red ink, so to speak, a flashback to when teachers used to mark students’ paper compositions with a red pen. From all of those marks on your sentences, you may have inferred that you’re not a “good” writer because of all the editing your drafts usually need. Or, perhaps the opposite is true for you. Maybe most of your writing projects received few sentence-level corrections, so you consider yourself a “good” writer because you have few sentence-level issues.
However, what is “good” for any piece of writing, as you know, depends on context and the ways in which five knowledge domains of writing are at play (discourse community, subject matter, genre, rhetorical and writing process knowledge—see Chapter 2). This applies to the sentence level as well. Furthermore, all writers need to take care at the sentence level. It’s about making informed choices as a writer. Yes, there are some matters of what is right or wrong, correct or incorrect, at the sentence level in particular contexts; however, more important to consider are the choices you need to make as a writer to most effectively communicate, and this begins at the sentence level.
Taking care at the sentence level of your writing—working with words, word order, punctuation, sentence boundaries, etc.—while especially crucial in final editing stages after revising, need not be reserved for the end of your writing process. Composition researcher and teacher Laura R. Micciche quotes from iconic American writer Joan Didion to show that “grammar is a positioning tool, a way of framing and presenting ideas that influence how and what we see”: “All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed” (Didion qtd. in Micciche 721). Therefore, finding the right word and wrestling with commas when we write help us see “the way we figure relationships among people, ideas, and texts” (721).
Sentence-level issues, those “red-pen” corrections that you may have received on previous writing projects for school, fall into two overall categories: style and grammar.
Style
Perhaps you have assumed—or been told—that style when it comes to writing is a matter of personal preference and that it’s not really necessary. It’s extra, a bonus. Rosenwasser and Stephen remark that style is “not just icing on the cake—cosmetic, a matter of polishing the surface” (225). They define style as referring “to all of a writer’s decisions in selecting, arranging, and expressing what he or she has to say” (225). They add that style in writing focuses on both diction (word choice) and syntax (sentence shape) (225). Consider style in two ways: as personal to you as a writer—choosing just the right word or sentence structure to best convey what you mean—but also reflective of the discourse, the way something is discussed in a particular discourse community, genre, and rhetorical situation. The latter is style in action.
TRY THIS to understand style. Review the following two sentences—one for an academic discourse community and the other for a business. Which stylistic choices of diction and syntax do you think were personal to the writer and which are reflective of the discourse community, genre, and rhetorical situation? Evaluate the effectiveness of these choices given each discourse community, genre, and rhetorical situation.
Sentence from a research report in a journal for economics:
Jones (2009) offers this type of marketing as a lens for analyzing social systems; however, to study social media specifically, we found it necessary to crack open the concept, making space for virtual environments.
Sentence from an employee handbook for a retail store:
Be sure to greet guests with a big smile as they enter the sales floor, like you’re reuniting with a cherished childhood friend.
Grammar(s)
While you may have assumed style is only personal and subjective, perhaps whenever you have heard the word grammar the modifier “proper” has preceded it, implying correct or incorrect. The concept of dialect complicates this. A dialect is a version of a particular language spoken in a geographical region, community, etc. The discipline of linguistics, the scientific study of language, established through research that no one dialect of English is right or wrong, correct or incorrect—all dialects of a language’s native speakers are equally grammatical (Kolln and Funk 7). Oftentimes sentences marked “ungrammatical,” as Kolln and Funk point out, are actually varied ways English is used in different dialects: “The Southern y’all or you all and the Philadelphia yous and the Appalachian you-uns (or y’uns) are all ways of pluralizing the pronoun you” (7). If your native language is not English or you’ve ever studied a language other than English, then you may have realized that a number of languages have both a singular and plural form of you, but most English dialects do not (“you guys” is often used instead). However, the dialects of English mentioned above do have a plural form of you as part of their grammars. These and all other English dialects are grammatical—they follow a set of rules that speakers all know and follow. This means it is “proper” to say English grammars—plural, not singular, as English is made up of multiple grammars.
Whatever your native language, you knew how to speak it before you ever stepped foot in a classroom, right? You already grasped its grammars well enough to use them. Then, as a writer, especially if English is your native language, why study its grammars? As you can imagine, grammar is tricky in context, especially when writing. As a writer in the English language it is important to be a lifelong learner of this language, studying standards for writing and how they change over time. This doesn’t mean memorizing handbooks and diagramming sentences, but it does mean you need to learn to become aware of how grammar is at work in what you read and write, so you can use it to serve your purposes.
TRY THIS to understand grammar. Fill in the blank below with the “correct” contraction.
You are not: You’re not You aren’t
We are not: We’re not We aren’t
They are not: They’re not They aren’t
It (or he or she) is not: It’s not It isn’t
I am not: I’m not I ______
What did you put in the blank? Whether or not your answer is correct will depend on the dialect.
Structural linguists, in describing the grammar of native speakers of a language, make a distinction between two kinds of rules for language: grammar rules (internal rules about the structure of a language) and usage rules (external social rules for language or “linguistic etiquette”) (Kolln and Funk 8). Therefore, if you wrote, I aren’t or I isn’t you may be incorrect because aren’t and isn’t are not contractions for am not—they don’t follow the grammar rule. However, if you wrote ain’t, which is a contraction for am not, then you may have broken a usage rule, depending on the dialect. According to Kolln and Funk, the contraction ain’t was commonly used in writing regularly in England and the United States until the nineteenth century when “the word became stigmatized for public speech and marked a speaker as uneducated or ignorant” (8). What does this example show you about the English language specifically and language in general? Can you think of other examples that point out the distinction between grammar and usage for any given dialect?
Certainly, all of this complicates how to know what is “correct” when you’re writing.