I went to a grammar school back in the 1960s and, yes, as the title suggests, I was taught grammar: a bit about sentence structure and what is a noun, a pronoun, a verb, an adverb, an adjective … I even did a bit or parsing (putting different bits of sentences in different boxes). I learnt a bit of Latin where there was the additional complication of matching gendered nouns and adjectives – but that helped with French (allegedly – it didn’t show up in my exam results). I had, you could say, a thoroughly old-fashioned education. The kind that in 2012 the then education secretary, Michael Gove, seemed to be harking back to a when he insisted that primary school pupils learnt ‘proper grammar.’
Except that the grammar he stipulated went so deep, even I didn’t understand what he was driving at, despite having gone on to do a degree in English, with a side dish of old and medieval English language structure for extra nourishment. Many schoolteachers and writers didn’t understand either, and most primary school children forgot it all within a year of starting at secondary school, chiefly because they thought it was both boring and irrelevant.
Children may not be the best judge of what is good for them, but recent research has come to their support, as a study by University College London has found that the learning of grammar, per se, has no positive impact on a child’s ability to write well and actually has a negative impact on their creative writing. Hence, a study of fronted adverbs, modal verbs, relative pronouns and the like may well be consigned to the bin. This would be a great relief for school children; teachers tasked with teaching them these grammatical terms; parents who try to help with the ensuing homework; and aspiring creative writers who wonder if a faulty grasp of the expanded noun in a subordinate clause is what has been holding them back all along.
Maybe the findings will have an impact too on the ‘pronoun militia’ that popped up more or less at the same time as Gove’s right-wing grammar dictums started kicking in. A new breed of diversity advisors have since instructed often sceptical work teams that putting your pronouns at the foot of emails and on name badges, demonstrates inclusivity. Others believe however that it does the opposite in meetings, and trying to place people, like words, into neatly labelled boxes, stifles debate and creativity.
Besides, even those of us who have got by for many decades with just a smattering of grammar, know that the pronouns you use in company are I/me, you, and (the nicely inclusive) we/us, rather than he/she/them. Our mothers, if not our teachers, were quick to tell us it was bad mannered to say ‘she’ about someone present. To do so would provoke the reprimand – ‘Whose she? She’s the cat’s mother! Don’t be rude.’
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