I learned a lot of grammar in middle school. We had to diagram sentences. I did it and did it well enough to get a good grade. We also learned about the parts of speech and other grammar matters in high school. I suppose most people do.
But when I became a law student, then a lawyer, and later a legal-writing teacher, I had to re-learn a lot of the grammar information I had supposedly learned in middle school and high school. I bet the same is true of many of my students. They learned grammar before they got to my legal-writing class, but they have to re-learn it now—meaning I have to teach it.
Why?
I have a theory.
1. When I learned grammar in middle school and high school, I was learning it just to spit it out on a test or fill it in on an exercise. It was just abstract information, necessary to get a good grade. Once I got the grade, I forgot it.
2. Forgot it? Really? How? You need grammar knowledge for the rest of your life—whenever you speak and on every writing assignment from high school through college.
Actually, no, you don’t.
3. If you are fairly intelligent (like my students here at Texas), you’ll make only a few mistakes on your papers right through the end of college, and you’ll never need to actually know what an independent clause is, what a dangling participle is, what coordinating conjunctions are, and so on.
4. Besides, my teachers in college were much more concerned about content and self expression than they were about fine points of grammar. They corrected only the most glaring mistakes I made, and I didn’t make many. Again, I assert that for fairly intelligent people like my students today, it’s possible to write high school and college essays and get good grades without a detailed knowledge of English grammar.
5. But law school is a bit different, and law practice is very different. For most lawyers, and this was definitely true for me, law practice requires more writing than anything before. For me, law practice easily required 10 times more writing than I’d ever done before.
I was doing a lot more writing, and naturally I had lots more opportunities to make writing mistakes.
6. And once you’re in law school and in law practice, you’re writing on subject matter that is more complex than anything you’ve written about before—so your writing naturally suffers because your brain is struggling to master the content.
My writing had more mistakes than ever before—mistakes I almost never made before.
7. Finally, in law school and law practice, your writing is subject to much more scrutiny than ever before. Accuracy, precision, correctness, and form matter a lot more than before.
My writing was scrutinized at a level I was unaccustomed to.
7. So I needed to know what a conjunctive adverb was. I needed to know the difference between a dependent clause and a phrase. I had to master a set of comma rules. I had to know how to use a semicolon. And so on. All the abstract, “useless” grammar stuff now became relevant. I had to re-learn it.
How did all this look to my legal writing teacher or the lawyers I worked for?
“Young people these days just don’t know grammar.”
“I’m surprised someone who went to Cornell would make mistakes like that.”
“We’re dealing with a generation of semi-literate lawyers.”
So yes, I do have to teach or re-teach grammar, and I’m not going to be cynical about it.