Grammar Doesn’t Really Matter

by Samantha MacMillan

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My biggest pet peeve is not the sound of a metal fork scraping a ceramic plate. It’s not nails on a chalkboard, loud chewing, a wet sock, tinfoil on your tongue, a foot tapping in a quiet classroom, or incessant dog barking. My archnemesis is the apostrophe. Not the apostrophe as punctuation and its very existence (what a miserable life I would lead if that were the case) but its misplacement when people try to abbreviate a year. To elaborate, should I want to put “Penn State 2025,” my graduation year, in my Instagram biography section, as is typical of students, I could properly abbreviate my graduation year to ’25. That is the proper way. However, the epidemic that haunts my peaceful existence is when people put the apostrophe at the end of the year, for example: 25’. It drives me up the wall like a manual paint roller. It’s everywhere. It infests all social media platforms. Many students are very curiously graduating in the year 2400, (the apostrophe represents replaced digits) as you read these words. Why do I care so much?

My mother is an English teacher. I like to think that I can write and speak eloquently in consideration of grammatical correctness (as you’ll later learn, that is pointless). After all, I’ve been corrected my entire life—she caught every error that spilled from my mouth or into an essay while peering over my shoulder and told me the right way to do something. Every error she noticed on signs, menus, in others’ speech, or any outlet of language would be pointed out to me and subsequently corrected, another coin tossed into my mental well of grammar knowledge. I was raised, as most of us were, to speak Standard English. I capitalized it as the name George Washington would be, as they are about the same in age and both dead as we know it. While I still entertain myself silently correcting grammar in my head or scouring social media posts for errors to feel righteous in knowing their wrongness, I learned for the first time recently that grammar is dead. Rest in peace, my love.

I learned this in the fall of my sophomore year when I took a class that had no grades: ENGL459, Advanced Rhetoric and Composition. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. One would think that it would be easier—mostly completion-based, grammar matters little in comparison to content and evident complexity of thought. I had an issue with it, having always been taught to check for spelling, punctuation, etc., until I finally understood why we were doing it. I later learned that most compositional grading is inherently biased, and it has been for decades (a big accusation, I’m aware, be patient with me). This was a moment in my life that derailed many trains of thought in my mind and changed the way I see the art of language forever. It makes sense when you think about it: students who speak English as a second language and students who grow up speaking dialects other than formal Standard English may struggle to have perfect grammar when crafting papers for ENGL101 and other courses in the timeline of their education. This potential struggle would be because English has, so we’ll say in respectful terms, the most nonsensical, abstract grammatical rules of any modern language. Why do we care so much about grammar?

In short, Standard English, coupled with perfect grammar, has been held on to for a long time as a signifier of class, competence, correctness, and other divisive and discriminating criteria. I had to overcome a feeling of guilt and ignorance coming to this realization; there was a privilege I had that I didn’t even know about because I had been so immersed in the education system.

I was caught up in the system’s desire for grammatical correctness my entire life, and I held judgment in my head when I caught errors despite the fact that I know I speak improperly in most scenarios.

My grammatically correct world was turned upside down by way of Asao Inoue, who has done a lot of work in advocacy for labor-based grading in composition classrooms. It places less emphasis on sentence-level errors and seeks more for checkpoints of class attendance, participation, content, organization, completion, effort. This is so that students who are deft English speakers and spend 20 minutes on a paper the morning of the due date do not pull ridiculously ahead on the grading scale in comparison to students who spent hours writing that same ENGL101 paper.

This same idea was reflected by my Writing Center advisor at Coastal Carolina University when he was giving me the training to begin working there: grammar was a “low-level” issue; “higher-level” issues were things like having a thesis, addressing the prompt, or meeting the number of source requirements and citing them correctly. We were meant to discuss the paper rather than snatch the student’s computer and rip through their writing comma by misspelling by subject-verb disagreement. It was fairly easy to put into practice; I enjoy any writing-related discussion.

The first time I really felt this concept shine, however, was with Hieu, who went by the American name “Jack.” He brought to me the ENGL101 assignment of a literacy narrative, much like this one I’ve composed, and had only been speaking English for a few years (he is Vietnamese and came here for college after living in Vietnam most of his life). I began reading his paper, and I could tell we had a lot of work to do—not because of the Vietnamese-English bridge, but because he didn’t really mention language or literacy in his paper at all… We spent over an hour going through the paper and attempting to weave in anecdotes about his struggles to learn English, being immersed in American school, and finding a Vietnamese family to help him speak both languages more fluently. He was actually late to ENGL101 that day because we spent so long revising his paper. A few weeks later, he came back in (a beloved regular to us tutors) and told me that he had gotten a 100 on that paper. We barely had time to touch grammar in that paper, but you know what? It was still a great literacy narrative. We spent over an hour on it just that one day. It’s even better in consideration of the fact that the entire thing was written in his second language.

Since taking that course, learning about ideological downfalls of the English language and having now worked in two different college writing centers, I am less tuned in to others’ grammar. This remolding, or should I say, breaking, of my relationship with compositional and conversational perfection is even more necessary in consideration of the fact that one day I hope to teach English at the college level myself. I still have a complex relationship with grammar; it’s difficult to ignore any errors I hear or see since having the standards planted in my brain. Language comes in so many forms, and every single one should be equally accepted and appreciated. This bleeds into other current issues in English, such as code-switching and code-meshing in the branch of Rhetoric and Composition, or honor dealt to newer novels representational of multicultural authors as opposed to “canonical” white male-written works of literature. Grammar is one of these issues. Rarely anyone speaks conversationally with perfect grammar anymore, so why stress it so much for students who just learned to speak English orstudents who are STEM majors taking ENGL101 as only a GenEd requirement? These are all questions to ponder, just like “When will wrong apostrophe placement stop bothering me?”

About the Author

Samantha MacMillan is a fourth-year student at Penn State University Park. She is pursuing a B.A. in English with a focus in literature and a minor in linguistics. After graduating in the Fall of 2024, she hopes to obtain a master’s in library and information science and teach writing at the college level. She has been a peer writing tutor for over a year at two different universities, and discovered she wanted to change her major to English by working in the writing center. She is also a peer workshop instructor and enjoys any opportunity to talk about language and writing. Some of her favorite words are klaxon, macabre, and obsequious.