Professors from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse gathered together to discuss the presence and value of grammar within the writing discourse on Nov. 12 from 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. The main objective of the meeting was to share different teaching methods to enhance student’s writings.

Bryan Kopp, an English professor at UWL, opened up the discussion with a broad question, “Why assign writing in the first place?” After a few minutes of reflection, the conversation was opened to the group of professors.

“Writing is a tool for thinking,” said Professor Darci Thoune.

Writing helps to work out what is trying to be said, added Professor Deborah Hoskins.

The professors in the room agreed that writing is an important part in all disciplines, however, the next question delved into the importance of grammar and how it fits into the curriculum of different departments.

“If you give your students easy things to fix, like commas, that is all they will fix. If they have ten dollars to spend in energy and you give them eight dollars’ worth of grammar errors to fix. Two dollars is not going to be enough to fix the unsubstantiated claims in this paper,” commented Director of the UWL Writing Center Virginia Crank.

Although the professors agreed that grammar is important, there seemed to be a disconnect with how to teach grammar within the different departments.

“I know there are professors who will take a student, who is a first year or even a sophomore class, and they will penalize them severely for not getting APA style right, but I know psychologists who publish all the time in the field, using APA, who still make mistakes. So, what’s going on there?” mentioned Kopp.

Kopp added, “The effects that the same advice has on students that are not motivated in that way can have the effect of being very demoralizing and they can give up. It is a tragedy, because very often that is their language. They have that feeling that I am not good at my own language.”

How to teach grammar became a controversial topic within the confines of the room. Linguistics professor Stephan Mann said, “We need to always be aware of how we talk about grammar and what that can mean for our students. Often times bad grammar can be used, not to just refer to some actual issues of writing that could affect the readability, but could have to do with issues related to dialect, background or upbringing.

“Sometimes that term bad grammar can actually mark a student’s cultural background, cultural upbringing and socio-economic background. There is a privileging of standard American English, which then privileges students that are raised with standard American English, which is closest to what we consider to be standard academic language.”

Although the meeting helped to share some strategies of how to teach grammar, it is just the beginning of figuring out a way to advance students’ learning in the best way possible.

Kopp concluded, “You can get the sense that you are a bad writer. You can kind of put it together and you are, like wait a minute, that’s not what schools supposed to be doing, like taking away people’s language. It should be empowering people to use it. Grammar is a part of that, but how do you acquire it?”