Essay On Prescriptive Grammar

Grammar has two primary approaches—prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive grammar is the general approach of right versus wrong, and historically the kind of approach overzealous English teachers apply to their students. Popular culture has lovingly deemed the rigid prescriptive grammarian the “Grammar Nazi,” which actually refers to the grade school graduate who clings tightly to the Latin based traditional rules and enforces those rules online. Due to these perspectives and due to various studies performed in classrooms, many have been rebuffing the study of grammar in schools. Some critics suggest that understanding grammar is ineffective and harms more than it helps writing. Contrary to the backlash against grammar

In From Critical Thinking to Argument, Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau encourage an active reading method, which urges readers to scrutinize a text closely. They ask their readers to annotate their texts comprehensively. Rather than being exclusionary, active reading necessitates understanding rhetorical structures and grammar. Grammar becomes a crucial component to establishing ethos in a rhetorical setting, and understanding grammar further helps readers ask what a writer might be hiding and why they might be hiding it (30). Weak style impacts arguments by inadvertently creating holes within the argument and depleting the logic—these critics suggest that the study of grammar helps writers to avoid obscuring meaning and they list various fallacies that can occur without an adept mastery of language (310-311). Beyond improving ability to detect fallacies in others’ writing, implementing the skills suggested by Barnet and Bedau helps writers while revising their own writing. Writers can take advantage of the problems with others’ writing and eliminate those problems in their own; however, they have to be able to diagnose these problems, which requires a basic understanding of these features in

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