Blog Post #3--Rhetorical Grammar

Micciche, Laura. “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar.” College Composition and Communication 55.4 (2004): 716-737. JSTOR. 31 May 2011.

Micciche begins her article by exploring why grammar instruction has become “unquestionably unfashionable” (716). She writes that grammar (how we actually put sentences together) tends to be discussed separately from writing (i.e., content and larger structural considerations), and that the connection between traditional grammar instruction and cultural oppression has made writing teachers understandably wary. However, she writes that an understanding of grammar is fundamental to an understanding of how meaning gets made in a sentence, and that “teaching grammar is not necessarily incompatible with liberatory principles,” and in fact is “central to composition’s driving commitment to teach critical thinking and cultural critique” (717-718).

One key to Micciche’s argument is that the now-common positioning of grammar at the end of the writing process leads to a conception of grammar as being focused on “finding and fixing errors rather than of active choice making for a purpose” (720). Micciche advocates a discussion of grammar throughout the writing process, with a focus on how syntactical choices affect the meaning of a sentence (this is the “rhetorical” part—the focus on grammar as a key component in the transaction of meaning between author and audience). The principal activity she describes is having her students keep “commonplace books,” or journals in which they record written passages from things they have read—fiction, non-fiction, textbooks, syllabi, and the like. Following each passage, students analyze how the author’s grammatical choices affect meaning and sometimes write their own passages which imitate the original author’s form (with an analysis of how they matched their content to the grammar, or why the subject about which they wrote meshed especially well with the syntax they were imitating). Micciche writes that she has two goals for the commonplace books: “first, to emphasize the always entangled relationship between what and how we say something; second, to designate a place where students document and comment on their evolving relationship to writing and grammatical concepts” (724).

Secondly, Micciche discusses how a rhetorical approach to grammar can support the critical pedagogy that informs much of composition studies by “making available to students a vocabulary for thinking through the specificity of words and grammatical choices, the work they do in the production of an idea of culture and an idea of a people” (731). In her examples, she describes how her students learn to examine how Malcolm X uses second person to reinforce the idea of African-American unity, and how Gertrude Stein’s “disruption of language conventions [connects with] her disruption of sexual categories and desires” (731).

In her notes, Micciche writes that the classes she describes are sophomore-level. This is certainly consistent with the relatively advanced assignments and journal entries she presents. However, I could see some of her ideas working well in a first-year composition class such as the ones I teach. For me, the most useful concepts she describes are the repositioning of grammar as an ongoing consideration, and the commonplace books, which encourage students to look carefully at how grammar and meaning are intertwined and to practice constructing sentences in new ways.