How to create a literate community in the age of Twitter and Facebook
An interview with Roy Peter Clark
[Editor’s note: Writing teacher Roy Peter Clark, author of WRITING TOOLS, has written a new book, THE GLAMOUR OF GRAMMAR. When most people think of grammar, glamour is not the word that springs to mind. Instead, grammar conjures everything unglamorous: drooling students asleep at their desks; frustrated teachers correcting papers; angry parents who worry that their kids can not read and write well enough to succeed in school and in life. Clark argues that it doesn’t have to be that way, that reading and writing and talking—a grammar of purpose and intent – can motivate children and inspire the adults who care for them.]
Hachette Book Group: The title of your book is THE GLAMOUR OF GRAMMAR. What makes grammar so glamorous?
Roy Peter Clark: Hundreds of years ago, glamour and grammar were the same word. It’s inconceivable, I know. But it’s true. It had to do with magic. Back then grammar included all kinds of practical language knowledge, including reciting magical spells. Even the word spells has two meanings: magic and language.
HBG: In what sense is grammar magical?
RPC: In the sense that a strong knowledge of practical English gives you powers that other lack: the power to understand, the power to persuade, the power to make meaning.
HBG: A lot of teachers and parents testify that kids don’t learn grammar these days, or that it’s not taught in what we used to call “grammar schools.”
RPC: Every child who is not impaired knows grammar, just not in the prescriptive way it is traditionally understood. These kids who supposedly don’t know grammar write thousands of text messages. They spend hours on Facebook and Twitter. They can read, memorize, and recite stanza upon stanza of rap and rhyme. But they do face some serious challenges when it comes to literacy – especially the boys.
HBG: And what are those?
RPC: They don’t think of the reading and writing they do on social networks as reading and writing at all. They don’t want adults to correct their grammar online or to criticize them for the kind of telegraphic, acronymic language they use with their friends.
HBG: Does it matter what they think of reading and writing, as long as they are doing it?
RPC: It does matter. As scholar Frank Smith has said, the best readers think of themselves as members of a kind of “literacy club.” Too many young people – and most old people as well – don’t think they are good enough to join such a club. They have been persuaded that language is not for them. They may not be illiterate, but they do not see the habits of literacy as central to their ways of engaging with the world.
HBG: What’s the answer?
RPC: We have got to find ways to demonstrate that the power of language is at the heart of what it means to be a good student, worker, friend, citizen. It begins in the home with parents and other caregivers. It means reading aloud to each other—for pleasure. It means monitoring the time spent watching television or playing video games. It means surrounding children with books and magazines.
HBG: I had that experience when I was a child. But what about the children who lack that kind of nurturing environment?
RPC: Here’s where other institutions come in: churches, Boys and Girls clubs, Big Brothers and Sisters, but especially the schools. If I ran a soccer school, I would not lecture about the sport. I would play games, of course, but would also make sure the kids got to practice the most important behaviors we expect of an excellent soccer player. In soccer terms, that means hours spent passing, trapping, tackling, shooting – with both feet – and heading. If that’s what I want them to do in a game, those are the skills they must practice – and get feedback on.
HBG: What does soccer have to do with grammar or literacy?
RPC: OK, we know what Pele did to make him great. So what did William F. Buckley Jr. and Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer do to make them superstars of literacy? They could do three things better than the rest of us: 1) read with a critical eye; 2) write with power, in a variety of forms; and 3) talk about reading and writing, how they work, how they make meaning.
HBG: So….
RPC: So if that’s what I want them to learn, if I want them to live inside the language, I can’t do it with a magic wand, even Harry Potter’s. In my school, children would read all the time, for serious purposes but especially for fun. They would read aloud to me and I them. They would write every day and be encouraged to tell their own stories. And they would talk, talk, talk to each other, to teachers, to parents, about how reading and writing work.
HBG: How can teachers and parents collaborate on how to help students?
RPC: This may seem like an odd answer, but teachers and parents have to become language learners themselves. Children need to see adults reading and writing and talking about stories. We hear it all the time in other areas of endeavor: “I come from an athletic family” or “I come from a musical family.” Don’t we want children to also boast: “I come from a very literate family?” What makes a family literate? What makes a classroom literate? Everyone, including the adults, devotes hours to the practice of literacy: reading, writing, talking.