Classical, Visual, and Rhetorical Grammar

"Let no man, therefore, look down on the elements of grammar as
small matters; not because it requires great labor to distinguish
consonants from vowels, and to divide them into the proper
number of semivowels and mutes, but because, to those entering
the recesses, as it were, of this temple, there will appear much
subtlety on points, which may not only sharpen the wits of boys,
but may exercise even the deepest erudition and knowledge."
—Quintilian

I happen to be one of those people who breaks out in a cold sweat with the thought of grammar, but although I have learned more grammar than I thought possible when our kids started learning Latin, I've had to dig even deeper as we have dyslexia running in family.

Happily, we've discovered some wonderful resources for classical and visual approaches to grammar - and it sure beats memorizing all the rules in Warriner's.

If you need to be persuaded of the importance of grammar, check out Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar, but in our case, we needed to troubleshoot some of the Writing problems of visual thinkers, so we wanted something reasonably direct, accessible, and memorable. Thankfully, we seem to have found this in a writer's workshop grammar book, Mechanically Inclined. There are some faults in this book (caveat emptor: some of the content of writing samples are poorly chosen - e.g. violent, tasteless etc.), but it is a very visual approach to grammar (like Image Grammar, but with better organization) and it satisfies a definite need for visual learners struggling with grammar conventions.

For every problem, Mechanically Inclined presents a student mistake, analysis of the mistake, correct examples from literature, and a visual scaffolding exercise that walks a student through correct grammatical writing. For example, in a chapter on dangling modifiers, the author provided examples of participial phrases used as openers, interrupters, and closers:

Wagging its tail, the dog approached me. Opener

The dog, wagging its tail, approached me. Interrupter

The dog approached me, wagging its tail. Closer

This approach is helpful because not because it gives students practice with sentence manipulation, but also because it allows grammatical conventions (like commas) to be naturally internalized through reading and writing, rather than rote memorization of a list of disembodied rules.

For older students, there is Rhetorical Grammar, a probably college-level text that teaches the art of grammar and persuasive writing.

Excerpt from a chapter on Sentence Rhythm:

The word eloquently has shifted the limelight from the topic of the speech to the senator's style of speaking; and, in doing so, it has set up a different expectation in the reader. We would not be surprised if the subject of the next sentence turned out to be he or she (the senator) rather than they (the homeless).

Haven't found many strong visual or rhetorical grammar sites freely available on the Internet, but let us know if you know of good ones. There are excerpts from Image Grammar here and here. We did find this nice link on Elaboration, however.

Institute for Excellence in Writing does have a new series entitled Classical Rhetoric Through Structure and Style. A sample chapter is posted here: here.