Anyone who is not already familiar with it should read Art's Blueprint for Educational Change: Improving Reasoning, Literacies, and Science Achievement with Cooperative Learning.

      Since most readers will be unable to ask anyone "what sort of chap" Vavra is, the purpose of this introduction is to describe my own buzz, as accurately as I can. Many people think of educational books as being "objective," i.e., neutral and non-biased (or, to use Carr's term, non-"buzzing"). But that is never the case. Every writer has  a motive. For some, it is simply money. For others, it is passion.

     The title of this book reflects my passion. The ambiguity of the title is intentional, for I believe that both grammar and the teaching of grammar can be liberating arts. I will attempt to demonstrate that if we teach grammar (and especially syntax) in the right way, we can enable students to become their own competent grammarians and thus free them both from their teachers and from the grammar books. In the process, we will free teachers from the burden of being grammatical policemen: students will no longer look at us as the enforcers of incomprehensible "rules."

     A basic premise of the book is that most teachers, when it comes to teaching grammar, have no idea of what they are doing or why. That premise is based on fifteen years of experience as editor of  Syntax in the Schools, a national newsletter on the teaching of grammar  (now the official newsletter of the Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar.) We receive a fair number of articles on how to teach or define this or that construction, but I have never seen even the suggestion of a comprehensive, systematic, new approach to teaching grammar. Explaining such an approach would, of course, require a book, and currently, pedagogical grammar is not the easiest topic on which to write a book. Although Warriner's is still one of the best selling textbooks, and thousands of teachers are entrenched in its definitions, the National Council of Teachers of English has passed a resolution against the teaching of all such grammars not supported by "theory and research." The battle is raging fierce, and, as with most battles, little constructive is being heard in all the noise. Perhaps it is time to call a truce, silence the guns, and listen to the buzzing of some of the bees in the middle.

     I believe that my own buzz is close to a middle position, but to let readers judge for themselves, perhaps I should explain its origin. I have had more than one journal article rejected because the journal's editorial readers simply assumed that I am a die-hard, traditionalist grammarian. In the first place, I am neither a grammarian nor a linguist. My degrees are all in  Russian Language and Literature, my dissertation was on literary theory, and as a student I took as few courses in linguistics as I could get away with. As a graduate assistant, I was assigned to teach "Russian Literature and English Composition" in Cornell's Freshman Writing Program. I found this interesting because my own Freshman course in composition (not at Cornell) had been extremely poor, and it was only as a graduate student that I was taught several basic things about writing. My students' papers quickly convinced me that I should give them what I had not been given as a Freshman: instruction about writing. We continued to read and discuss Russian novels, but as the year continued, I found myself more and more involved in the teaching of writing. I enjoyed helping students express their own ideas clearly and persuasively.

     As I look back at it, I realize that not only was I teaching at one of the more selective universities in the country, I was also teaching some of the best of Cornell's Freshmen. These students had been able to choose from a variety of course options, from writing about philosophy to several sections of "Writing about Experience." That they chose Russian literature indicated that they were already widely-read and experienced with language. Thus, most of my teaching involved the nature of argument, thesis, details, etc. We did very little work on grammar -- they didn't need it. I do remember, however, my frustration about their inability to use semicolons correctly. Several times I explained that semicolons are best used to separate main clauses, preferably to suggest that the reader consider the contrasting implications of the ideas in the clauses: "She did the dishes. He went swimming." simply states two facts. "She did the dishes; he went swimming." invites the reader to consider the idea that she is working whereas he is goofing off.
     The explanation was ineffective: inapt semicolons continued to appear in my students' writing. After my final semester as a teaching assistant, I ran into one of my former students in the library, and we started looking through her papers. She was, it turned out, one of the semicolon villains. I asked her why she hadn't listened to my explanation. She had listened, she said, but she (and many of her classmates) did not know what a clause is. I now continually exhort students to ask questions if they do not understand a word I use, but I mention this story primarily because it suggests why so much of traditional grammar  may be ineffective: instruction has been divorced from the students' own writing!

     My new interest in teaching writing resulted in my getting a job in the English Department at Shenandoah College. At Shenandoah, my students were more typical college Freshmen, and I began to notice more and more the mangled sentences crossing my desk. My background in languages (I had studied French, Italian and German in addition to Russian.) made me the Department's linguist/grammarian, and I did not particularly mind the role since I was curious about the cause of all those mangled sentences and about what could be done about them. I even volunteered to teach the remedial writing courses, both as classes and as tutorials. When Shenandoah added an education program, I was asked to teach a "grammar course" for future teachers. I agreed, but only on the condition that I would teach what I believed future teachers need to know.

     In those days, I was blissfully unaware of what I have since come to call the "great grammar debate." I did not know anything at all about the research that claims that grammar is ineffective, but I did feel that something was wrong with what students -- and teachers -- were learning and doing. I spent the summer preceding my first grammar course reading a variety of pedagogical grammars as well as structural and transformational  grammars and books on general linguistics. Although I found Paul Roberts' Understanding Grammar to be the clearest presentation of English grammar that I had ever seen, I was not happy with it, primarily because it presented constructions individually and lacked the analytical power and visual aid of sentence diagramming. Diagramming itself did not appeal to me because I found it too cumbersome, even with relatively simple sentences, and  my goal was to teach students how to analyze the sentences in their own writing. What I came up with is essentially the system that is presented in this book. I took from Roberts only those constructions that were absolutely necessary for analyzing sentences, discarding, for example, distinctions among kinds of pronouns, and retained some of the visual power of diagramming by having students place parentheses around prepositional phrases and brackets around clauses. If the paragraphs that students are given to analyze are typed double-spaced, students do not even need to copy the sentences. Over the years, using concepts from structural and transformational grammar, I have, I believe, been able to simplify and reduce the number of concepts that students need to learn, but that story is told in a later chapter.

     My grammar course, taught every second year, accounted for only one-sixteenth of my teaching load, but when several experienced high school teachers took the course and encouraged me to publish my work, I decided to try to do so. My initial attempts were rejected, with comments such as "this writer is totally unaware of the research of the last twenty years." The comments were correct, so I started to read the research. In doing so, I found much to confirm my original belief that the traditional approach is ineffective, but nothing that comes close to convincing me that students should not study grammar. The work of such people as Kellogg Hunt and Roy O'Donnell, however, presented me with a new question: they argue that syntactic structures develop in a set sequence, i.e., that children naturally develop a command of some constructions (subordinate clauses) before others (participles). From the first grammar course that I taught, and perhaps by sheer luck, I had had students deal with one construction at a time and then add a new one. Thus I gave them a ditto of an essay written by a student and had them place parentheses around all the prepositional phrases. Then we went to another essay and did prepositional phrases plus subjects and verbs. Then to another in which we added the bracketing of subordinate clauses. As I read the studies by Hunt, O'Donnell and others, I realized that the sequence my students had been using paralleled, in its major features, the natural, developmental sequence proposed by the researchers. 

     At the suggestion of my students, I tried to publish in book form the materials I had been using with them. Several publishers expressed interest, but concluded that the approach is different from what everyone else is doing, and, since no one is currently using my approach, there was no market for my book. My next idea was to write a book about the approach: if I could get people interested in the approach, perhaps I could create a market for the textbook materials. (Actually, if you understand this book, you will see that you do not need a grammar textbook. All you need are a couple of hand-outs and some dittos of your own students' writing.)  The book about the approach is what is currently in your hands. Most of it was written over a decade ago. The reactions of publishers and their editorial readers were interesting. Some didn't like the statistics -- they would be more interested if I took the statistics out; others wanted more statistics in. Linguists didn't like the grammar -- they said it is too simple. Educators wanted more about educational theory. 

     Unable to satisfy everyone, and unsure of which way to go while still saying what I wanted to say, I put the manuscript on a shelf (where it remained for a decade), and devoted my energy to starting Syntax in the Schools, a national newsletter/forum for discussing questions of grammar. Although I am now at Pennsylvania College of Technology and no longer teach a grammar course for teachers, I continue to use my approach, squeezed into three weeks in my Freshman composition sections. The major problem I was having was in getting students to be able to recognize prepositional phrases. Several years ago, I received a grant from the college to develop a computer program which would do this instruction. In the process of learning how to use the computer authoring program, I asked Art Whimbey if I could make a computerized version of the text reconstruction exercises in his and Elizabeth Jenkins' Analyze, Organize, Write.  He graciously agreed, and, in the course of our correspondence, he agreed to read this manuscript. Having read it, he suggested that I at least "make it available." At the same time, he was trying to get Lawrence Erlbaum, publisher of AOW, to publish my computerized version. Although Mr. Erlbaum declined, he did give me permission to sell it. In order to sell the software, I formed Rose Parisella Productions. Since I was doing all the work to form the company, it simply made sense to make TGLA available through it. Now that the web is available, I'm simply putting the "book" here for anyone who is interested. That, in essence, is the history of my buzz.

     It does not, however, fully explain the nature of that buzz. I believe that every student should study grammar, but that they should master all that they need to know about it before they graduate from high school. It should not be taught in colleges (except for future teachers, who need to know more than their students). What most students need to know is primarily  how to analyze the clause structure of their own sentences. To do this, they do not need a lot of terminology, nor do they need to know the complicated principles of a structural or transformational grammar. Actually, a slightly modified, high simplified version of traditional grammar is adequate for the job. Traditional grammar has failed in the classroom not because the grammar itself is bad, but because it was not taught very well -- too much attention was placed on learning definitions, and not enough was placed on actually using the concepts. As Thomas Kuhn notes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like "force," "mass," "space," and "time," he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. [2nd. revised edition. University of Chicago Press, 1970. 47.]

Traditional grammar gave students textbook definitions, but never enabled students to apply these definitions to the problem of analyzing their own sentences. But it is only through such  problem-solving that the definitions become meaningful and relevant to the students.

     Finally, I believe that instruction in syntax may be a crucial pre-condition for improving some students' ability to read, write, and think. I am aware that research indicates that professional writers do not think about grammar while they write and that poor writers often do. Some composition specialists have looked at that research and drawn the wrong conclusions: they have assumed that since good writers do not think about grammar, we can improve the writing of poorer writers by trying to get them not to think about grammar (and thus by not teaching it). Such a conclusion overlooks the developmental fact that good writers have internalized most grammatical rules, thereby making them automatic. Poor writers have not done so: that is why they think about grammar when they are writing. And there is no way in which they can become better, more fluent writers by avoiding a study of syntax (except by years of reading, years which they have missed and thus no longer have). I base this statement on an interpretation of what psycholinguists call Short-Term-Memory (STM).
     STM can be viewed as the antechamber of the mind: all incoming (or outgoing) information must pass through it. Psycholinguists pretty much agree that STM handles linguistic information in syntactic form, but that as information is passed to Long-Term-Memory, the syntax is stripped from the ideas. Linguistic information must therefore be syntactically  decoded (or encoded) as it passes through STM. But STM is also a bottleneck: the general agreement is that it can handle only five to nine "bits" of information at a time. If this theory is correct, then poor writers can not be helped by getting them to stop thinking about grammar. They may, under our insistence, do so, but then their writing will either consist of juvenile sentences or of syntactic swamps, neither of which will clearly express what the students want to. The solution, it seems to me, lies in the other direction -- in helping these students, as quickly as possible, to master and make automatic the syntactic connections that are currently clogging their STM.
     Intermediate students of foreign languages can probably understand this problem (and agree with my solution) without the psycholinguistic theory. They continually find themselves, as they try to write or speak in the foreign  tongue, hung up on questions of grammar. In the short term, they solve this problem by making a stab at the correct form or case, but they also realize that the ideas they are able to express are nowhere nearly as complex as those which they regularly express in their native tongue. They also realize that the more they study grammar -- the more automatic they can make it, the more complex the ideas which they are able to express and the more quickly they can express them.

     Studying grammar will not automatically make anyone a good writer or reader. To use a poor metaphor, we might say that the study of grammar lubricates the channel of linguistic communication: that channel must be open, and it must be easily traversable, but even more important are the ideas that flow through it. Most of a teacher's time in class should be devoted, not to grammar, but to helping students read, discuss, and develop ideas. Currently, however, teachers and students spend far too much time on grammar. What has happened, I would suggest, is that teachers, parents and administrators have realized that the pedagogical channel itself has been blocked: the grammatical message is not getting through to students. Their response, by and large, has been to increase the amount of time in class and the amount of homework devoted to the traditional ineffective instruction. (Or they  have decided that their students are rats and have opted for pure sentence-combining, devoid of instruction in grammar. See Chapter One.) The approach presented in this book would, I firmly believe, result in much less time having to be spent studying grammar, thereby freeing class time for other activities.

     If I had to characterize the concepts presented in this book, I would call them a Copernican view of grammar. Copernicus did not change the positions of the planets, he did not rename them, nor did he simply ignore them (as many advocates of sentence-combining would like us to ignore grammar). He simply changed our understanding of their interrelationships. And just as many of the details of Copernicus' system were incorrect (He still believed that the planets travel in circles.), so too, many of the details of the system I present may be. I make this comparison to Copernicus not from conceit, but rather with a humble request to the reader to judge this book not by its details, but rather by the perspective it attempts to explain.

     Pedagogical grammar fits a surprising number of the details of what Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, calls "paradigm shifts." As I explain in Chapter One, for hundreds of years, a primary assumption of pedagogical grammar was that it should be word-based. As the failure of traditional grammar as a pedagogical tool became more widely recognized, numerous alternatives were proposed and explored: structural grammar, transformational grammar, sentence-combining. I attempt to explain in Chapter One why none of these approaches has been, or will be able to achieve a new consensus, a new paradigm. What all these approaches have in common, though, is an emphasis on sentence-based, rather than word-based grammar. The approach offered in this book simply shifts the perspectives of traditional grammar from the word to the sentence. I might note that I also  find my own role explained by Kuhn, who notes that "almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change" (90). As I stated above, my own field is Russian literature. I thus came to the field of pedagogical grammar with no preconceptions, with no vested interests. All I did was to take the few remaining pieces of the puzzle, most of which had already been pieced together, and put them together. Whether I have done so correctly or not remains  for the reader to decide.

     This book is organized into four parts. Part One, "Background and Theory," presents some general perspectives. Chapter One briefly traces the history of pedagogical grammars. It tries to explain why we are where we are in the teaching of grammar. The failure of traditional grammar can be explained in its historical origin. A historical perspective can also explain why approaches such as the "structural" or "transformational" have not worked in our schools. Chapter Two then examines traditional  grammar to suggest what is pedagogically wrong with it and how it can be modified with concepts from structural and transformational grammars. The major defect of traditional grammar, however, is not the grammar itself, but the educational frame of mind in which it has been taught. Chapter Three thus looks at a larger question -- our theories of teaching -- to, among other things,  suggest that teachers and textbooks should not be the source of all authority and answers: the most important thing teachers can do is to make students understand that they can become their own authorities. Chapter Four presents background of a different kind. Based on the work of Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Kellogg Hunt, it explores what we know of the natural development of syntactic maturity starting at age five. (Most developmental theories and theorists are concerned with pre-school children, and thus have little relevance to what should be taught in our schools.) In essence, this chapter should help parents and teachers understand why appositives should not be taught in fourth grade. Chapter Five explores a developmental theory of syntax implied in the work of Hunt, Walter Loban, etc.

     Part Two, "A Pedagogical Syntax," presents a descriptive theory of syntax which can be used to help students understand how sentences work. Chapter Six explains all the concepts (and they are not very numerous) needed to explain how any word in any sentence relates to the main subject and verb. The theory will not satisfy linguists, but it is totally adequate for graduate courses in the syntactic aspects of writing style, and hence, for the description of students' writing. 

     Chapter Seven covers the same constructions in the same order, but from a practical, pedagogical point-of-view, suggesting various kinds of exercises and also demonstrating how the study of syntax can be spread over grades three through ten.  Chapter Eight follows the lead of Mina Shaughnessy and suggests that there are patterns to syntactic errors. It also suggests that numerous errors are the result of natural syntactic development and that a teacher's attempt to "correct" them may, in fact, only reinforce them. Finally, it suggests how the pedagogical approach presented in Chapter Seven will help students correct errors without specifically drawing attention to them. 

     Part Three, "Beyond the Teaching of Syntax," extends the theory presented in Part Two to instruction in reading, writing, and thinking. Chapter Nine, on reading, presents a simple psycholinguistic model of the reading process, a model which can help people understand why syntactic errors are indeed errors. The chapter also explores how an inadequate command of syntax may be the source of many students' frustration with reading. Chapter Ten, on writing, primarily concerns style. In addition to explaining how a conscious command of syntax can help students understand such things as parallel construction and subordination, the chapter presents stylistic discussions of several passages, professional and student, to suggest the kinds of questions that students could discuss if they were taught by using the method presented in this book. Chapter Eleven addresses a currently popular topic, the teaching of thinking. The definition of "thought" presented  therein is by no means comprehensive, but it suggests that syntax is a prerequisite of thought. 

     Part Four, "Research," was originally intended to include a lot of material on statistical research. In writing it, I realized that many teachers might not be interested, so much of the material was pulled with the hope of including it in a separate publication. I could not, however, consider this book complete without including some suggestions about having students perform statistical studies in the classroom.

     Some readers (and non-readers) of this book will find its cover pretentious. The Liberty Bell? The Bell was, I might note, an afterthought, the result of my search for a graphic to put on the cover. The title of this book has been in my head for several years, the idea being that, taught the right way, grammar can liberate students from the rules of textbooks and English teachers. But I have used the analyzed sentences from the Declaration of Independence as an exercise with students for several years. It seemed appropriate for the cover, and the sentences suggested the Liberty Bell as a graphic. I hesitated, but as Chapter Nine indicates, many students cannot understand such sentences because of their lack of training in syntax. An understanding of syntax will not solve all political problems, but without such an understanding, most people may be automatically disenfranchised. I stand by the Bell.

     Dostoevsky, still one of my favorite writers, used to complain that only ten percent of what was in his head would come out onto the page. I understand how he felt. There is much that I would like to add and to polish in this manuscript, but the time has come for me to let it go. In doing so, I want to thank the people who have made it possible. My mother is most responsible for who and what I am. Not only has she always been emotionally supportive, she has also supplied me with most of my computer equipment, without which most of my work would have been impossible. My wife, Toni, has provided me with a home, an environment, and the time without which this project could not have been completed. My son, Paul, taught me more about language as he was growing up than any textbook or research study could have. Willingly or unwillingly, my students, over the years, have helped polish the ideas and the approach presented herein. And last, but not least, I want to thank Art Whimbey for encouraging me to take this manuscript out of the drawer (where it sat for ten years) and to make it publicly available. I hope that you will agree with him -- that reading it is not a waste of your time.