Instructor: Evans
TR 11:00 AM 12:20 PM
This course is designed to make learning grammar interesting and even enjoyable. The main purpose of this class is to help students improve their understanding of various English grammars from a rhetorical perspective, allowing them to become more knowledgeable language users, more accomplished speakers, and more effective writers. We will begin by examining the basic sentence elements of subject, verb, object, adjective, and adverb. We will then study larger issues of sentence structure, phrases, clauses, and the many subtleties of sentence embedding. Throughout all of this, we will work as language learners, deriving the rules of English inductively from data—rather than deductively from time-honored concepts that in many cases don’t hold up to close scrutiny. Our data will include sentences from a variety of contexts and linguistic backgrounds: literary works, academic journals, bureaucrats’ memos and reports, students’ own writing, as well as everyday speech. Each week, we will work on issues of grammar, punctuation, and style in writing. Students preparing to be English/Language Arts teachers will have an opportunity to examine the role of grammar instruction in the classroom, and students interested in professional writing or editorial work will consider the role of grammar in those contexts.