What is grammar?
Rules for sentences, not for comma use

Being able to answer the question, "What is grammar?" is essential to those of us who teach writing, although the definition doesn't matter much to teachers whose focus is grammar for speaking or for scoring well on bubble tests.

Each language has its own rules for generating sentences. Those rules are the language's grammar. There is no one universal set of rules for generating sentences.

Grammar is about relationships

To study grammar means to study the structural relationships between words and word components within a particular language.

The importance of knowing grammatical relationships becomes clear when you see people attempting to learn a new language; they have less difficulty learning new words than they have getting the structural relationships right.

Grammar's two aspects

Grammar comes in two styles, one descriptive and one prescriptive.

Descriptive grammar tells what happens

Descriptive grammar identifies the basic way people put words together to form sentences in a particular language and how they modify the basic pattern to express more complex ideas.

Every language has basic ways of putting words together that constitute a "lowest common denominator" for that language. Native speakers learn their language's basic grammar by seeing and hearing language without having formal training.

In English the basic way of forming a sentence is to follow the order subject › verb › object. A language could just as easily order the elements in other ways:

• Subject › Object › Verb.
• Verb › Subject › Object.
• Verb › Object › Subject.
• Object › Subject › Verb.
• Object › Verb › Subject.

Each of those distinctive patterns represents what is the grammar—the rules for forming sentences—of a particular language.

In societies with written languages, there are also more complex ways of using language that are considered superior, educated, or high class. Descriptive grammar records both the basic and the complex ways of forming sentences. It does not say anything about whether one is preferable to the other.

Prescriptive grammar says what ought to be

When most of us try to answer the question, "What is grammar?" we talk about prescriptive grammar, the picky, critical set of rules most of us associate with the boredom of English class.

Prescriptive grammar is an attempt to tell people how they ought to form words and how they ought to form sentences.

Questions about prescriptive grammar make up a significant portion of items on standardized tests of grammar knowledge.

Prescriptive grammar is derived from studying how the educated, affluent, high-social status people in a culture use language. Native speakers of a language can make themselves understood without knowing the rules of prescriptive grammar.

People who want to advance socially and economically must master at least the rudiments of their language's prescriptive grammar. In this regard, see Maxine Hairston's research into grammar errors that annoy professional people.

What is grammar not?

When you hear a complaint about students' "bad grammar," the gripe may not be about grammar. The public has a tendency to lump all sorts of mechanical aspects of writing under the heading of grammar.

Punctuation is not part of grammar. People can put sentences together orally without using any punctuation at all. Punctuation, however, does have a close relationship to grammar. Grammar determines where punctuation goes, and punctuation reveals how the words are to be interpreted grammatically.

Usage is not part of grammar either. Usage refers to the way a particular speech community uses words; it is not about entire sentences. Some English usages that have been used by educated people for a long time have acquired status of rules. However, unlike grammar, which is systematic, usage is unsystematic and idiosyncratic.

Correct spelling of words is not part of grammar. The text messaging abbreviations that many folks call misspellings are not part of grammar either.

Formatting such rules for citing sources and use of lists or subheads is not part of grammar.

Knowing what is grammar and what is not grammar can help you decide how to teach these various types of writing mechanics that often get thrown in with grammar.