Grammar and Privilege
A recent book about punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, warns that if we don’t know the rules of grammar and punctuation, we risk being misunderstood—or worse—being perceived to be “illiterate.”
What about you? Do you say that you’re good at grammar? How you answer that question depends on all sorts of things, including what is meant by “grammar” and how one becomes good at it. For good or ill, we have set up mechanisms that sort people based on grammatical proficiency. But is that fair? Should we use skills in grammar as a means to judge writing and writers?
Johan Christopherson is a faculty member in the English department at Normandale Community College
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