semester long inquiry project where we were supposed to look into a topic connected to the field of composition. For my project, I completed a review of research that traced the history and evolution of the concept of grammar in the classroom. Just like now, I wasn’t necessarily interested in the grammar debate (although it provides the backdrop), but I was interested in the way that teachers of composition conceptualize grammar. My main argument was that “by understanding where we have come in our thinking about grammar in the classroom and by recognizing the need for awareness about this topic, then we can begin to develop methods for effectively addressing and teaching grammar in the composition classroom.” I was curious if the way that we talk about grammar in the classroom shapes the way that our students understand grammar, and I found that there were at least three distinct eras where grammar was conceptualized in very different ways.

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There is the traditional conceptualization that was set forth by the Committee of Ten in 1892 and reinforced throughout the first half of the twentieth century until it was disrupted by the linguistic reconceptualization in the 1960’s following the structural work of Chomsky as well as the “harmful” studies by Elley and Braddock et al. However, this linguistic conceptualization was soon replaced by a new understanding of grammar in terms of rhetoric and context. By understanding these different ways that teachers have conceptualized grammar, I argued that we could see how those conceptualizations may have affected the way that students understood grammar…or at least those were my initial ideas. However, after writing through plans for a project and offering possible avenues for further research, I decided that I wasn’t nearly as interested in the cognitive linguistics side of this project as I thought I would be and that I needed a new approach. Hence, I began a directed reading on grammar in the college composition field with Ron Lunsford, Ph.D last fall.​
 

At the beginning of this directed reading, I wanted to open up my topic a bit since I had gone a little too narrow with my work on the history of the field in light of cognitive linguistics; although I wanted to recast and widen my net of research, I did work under some guiding principles. My original topic for my directed reading was “the rhetoric of grammar in the composition classroom” and my guiding question was “what are we saying to our students about what we value when we talk about grammar and writing?” I began to read (and re-read) some of the foundational articles for understanding grammar such as Hartwell and Francis before we moved into the debate itself with articles from Kolln, Shook, and Hill. What happened at this point was a bit unexpected because during a discussion of Connors’s chapter on “Composition-Rhetoric, Grammar, and Mechanical Correctness,” we found the guiding principle for my entire project: stasis theory.

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I think that Richard Enos was right on target when he said that we should look back to classical rhetorical theory in order to understand contemporary communication problems. There doesn’t seem to be a greater problem in contemporary communication than the role of grammar in communication and writing, and it seemed like the perfect issue for the application of the classical argumentation theory of stasis. Even before we came to the idea of using stasis, we kept talking around the perspective when I would comment on how the debate had come to a “standstill” or that they couldn’t come to the “same terms” in the argument. Therefore, it seemed useful to do more of a rhetorical analysis of the grammar issue in composition and to see what stases are causing the disruption and perpetuation of this great debate. Although I did look back at the classical texts of Cicero and Quintilian, my work with stasis theory is primarily derived from Jeanne Fahnestock, Marie Secor, and Sharon Crowley.

Although stasis theory was not my original intention for this graduate project, I now feel like there is no better way to enter a hundred year old conversation. Rather than having to answer the question of whether or not to teach grammar in the composition classroom, I am now able to take a critical look at the debate itself--something that seems much more fruitful than rehashing the debate yet again. I am excited to have found this lens to view the grammar issue and finally feel as if I have found a place to stand in this debate.





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