Everyone knows that there are a few essential ingredients for a party. Balloons, food, music…and a grammar and punctuation dictionary.
What do you mean you’ve never been to a party like that? You’re clearly missing out.
Of course, for the strange majority - people who don’t enjoy a bit of verb conjugation on a Saturday night - grammar can be a bit of a dry subject. Pity the children in our primary schools then, who are now expected to have mastered the art of the passive voice and modal verbs by the age of 11.
Though there are ways to make things easier for everyone:
- A spoonful of sugar
Turns out, Mary Poppins was right. About all sorts of things, but specifically the “element of fun” in every job. Silly sentences, full-body punctuation, adverb mimes - whatever it takes to inject a sense of enjoyment and “Snap! The job’s a game!”
- Bite-sized chunks
Sticking with the “having to digest something that is sometimes unpalatable” theme, it’s always much easier to eat your Brussels sprouts* when they are interspersed with other foods, rather than in one mammoth sitting. Little and often is the way with grammar, too. After all, a punctuation mark a day keeps Ofsted away…
(*or whatever your least favourite vegetable happens to be)
- Accentuate the positive
But let’s try not to get run over by the “grammar sucks” bandwagon. It might be dry but it is also pretty amazingly useful when it comes to making our written communication clear, and it can really help children to see the point and stick with things if they realise this.
- Practice is as useful as theory
Whilst discrete lessons are often necessary to help children master the basics in the first place, you can only really appreciate a semi-colon once you’ve seen it in action in a real context. Giving children the chance to use their new-found skills in an actual, unrelated piece of writing can give them a heady sense of grammatically correct power.
- Accept your own limitations
You will undoubtedly teach some future librarians, DfE inspectors and general grammar pedants in your time who will find the subject “fun” all on their own. But it’s also OK to acknowledge that for the rest, grammar is a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
And if all else fails, remind them that without English’s complex range of punctuation marks, the world would probably never have discovered the joy of emoji speak… :-), :-D, ;-)
Kate Townshend has been teaching in schools in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire for more than 10 years. She tweets as @_KateTownshend
