Over 40 years of teaching, I’ve been to enough departmental grading norming sessions and scoring workshops to notice that not even English teachers agree on exactly what the term grammar means. For example, some of my colleagues get really bent out of shape when a student begins a sentence with the adverb hopefully, although as Peter Sokolowski in Merriam-Webster’s Ask the Editor points out, there’s nothing wrong with using hopefully as a sentence adverb, or disjunct, meaning “I hope,” just we often use frankly in the same manner: “Frankly, it doesn’t bother me at all when students use the adverb ‘hopefully’ in the initial position in a sentence.”
One Response
Good points; I do think it goes deeper than this, though. I’ve been collared by a fair number of colleagues who don’t teach writing and want to complain about their students’ writing. Often they point to grammar, mechanics, usage, spelling, etc. because they are concrete and quantifiable. With a little listening and digging, we often find that it’s a matter of organization, vague generalizations, lack of knowledge of the profession’s writing conventions, and so on. That’s a more specialized, and sometimes nebulous, set of problems. Thankfully they are not insurmountable.