One rarely sees the words ‘glamour’ and ‘grammar’ in the same sentence. But these two words share a strong bond. In the past, the word ‘grammar’ referred to diverse forms of knowledge, including magic. The first ‘r’ in grammar is a liquid sound. Some people replaced that first ‘r’ with another liquid sound ‘l’. Grammar became glamour. A person who knew grammar–secret knowledge—was referred to as being glamourous.
Circa 2011, British Council, Chennai. I, with a group of trainee teachers, was waiting for the trainer to enter the classroom. When she did, she said, ‘Today, we’ll look at grammar.’ A collective sigh of dismay filled the room. The trainer pleaded, ‘Grammar is fun.’ We were not convinced. If this was the reaction of future English-language teachers, what could we expect from students? Indeed, grammar has a bad reputation.
After completing the teacher training course, I taught at the British Council in Chennai. I noticed that the learners, mostly adults, struggled with grammar. Without a strong foundation in grammar, they found it difficult to improve their language skills. Learning grammar seemed daunting, requiring patience and perseverance. Unfortunately, most students wanted instant results. My response was to write a book on the subject. I wanted to introduce grammar points through conversation.
At the British Council, the classrooms were embedded in the library. To reach the classrooms, we had to walk in-between the bookshelves. One day, a book caught my eye. It was Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation. That book provided the framework for my story. It inspired me to imagine a self-contained world where the narrative would take place—the ‘Grammar Dimension’.
The protagonist Q goes on an adventure in the dimension, learning grammar points by conversing with trees that speak only when there is a breeze, a lazy bookworm named Wow Woz, the owner of a store that holds memories.
Meanwhile, someone, with nefarious intentions, is planning to create anti-grammatical sand. Anti-grammatical sand could only be made at nine o’clock, on a full moon night, in the third month in the Year of the Dash. Contact with anti-grammatical sand may lead to severe memory loss of grammar. Here is the spell to make that dangerous sand:
This is the spell of bad grammar
which I cast on this sand
from the shores of
the Sea of Wishes.
May we use the article a in front of a vowel sound;
May we end an uncountable noun with the letter s;
May we confuse the past perfect with the past simple;
May we use no punctuation marks in our writing;
May our sentences make no sense at all!
May this sand become anti-grammatical sand!
While writing this article, I re-read these lines from this spell of bad grammar. I wondered whether we are living in a world in which anti-grammatical sand already exists. Has it been surreptitiously sprinkled on our WhatsApp messages and emails?
Let’s look at a line from the spell—May we end an uncountable noun with the letter s. This happens all the time. Words such as equipment and feedback are uncountable nouns. But people say: ‘there are two equipments in the hall’. ‘Thank you for the feedbacks’. These errors are not uncommon.
How about this line from the spell? May we use no punctuation marks in our writing. Many WhatsApp messages are punctuation-free. In fact, placing a full-stop at the end of a sentence may be misconstrued as a form of micro-aggression. The semi-colon has nearly lost all grammatical significance. It is usually used to express a wink. Even that is becoming increasingly difficult to do. The semicolon plus right bracket combination gets immediately converted into a winking emoji.
The second last line of the spell is: May our sentences make no sense at all! I believe we haven’t reached that stage yet. On most occasions, even if there are spelling and grammatical errors, sentences are understood. And so, that begs the question, do we need to learn grammar at all?
There’s another elephant in the room: Artificial Intelligence (AI). My interaction with AI is restricted to asking questions on Perplexity and ChatGPT. What disturbs me is how AI is being used to write emails, letters, and presentations.
When I conducted a training session at an IT company in Noida, I asked the participants to write an email and send it to me. Reading those emails was a moment of cognitive dissonance. The message was clear and error-free. The verbs were in the correct tense. The vocabulary was appropriate.
The problem was that I had heard the participants make presentations in class. When they spoke, there were many grammatical errors. There were times when the word choice was not appropriate. Obviously, to write those emails, the magic wand of AI was used.
On the one hand, using AI to correct one’s writing may be a positive development. It empowers the writer, especially if they did not have the opportunity to learn English well at school. On the other hand, it provides a false sense of achievement. Why struggle to learn grammar when AI will clean up your draft in seconds?
AI has become a crutch. In online classes, some students even use AI to get help before joining a speaking activity. That means that they are asking AI to tell them what to say and how to say it. If this happens on a regular basis, how will they ever learn the language?
In a world where AI is entering every sphere of life, we need to cultivate our minds. AI could help in drafting routine emails. And to a certain extent, I would urge people to use it. However, we need to use our minds to express complex ideas and to convince people with our spoken words. Our minds should understand the nuances of a specific situation so that we can express ideas with precision. If we solely rely on AI, we become bland and predictable. We all sound the same. Our individuality is lost.
With the adoption of AI at the workplace, we need to be able to do things AI cannot. Now, more than ever, we need to have strong critical thinking skills. We need to be creative. And we need to communicate effectively. If we do not cultivate these skills, we will be made redundant by AI.
Grammar allows us to express our ideas, emotions, and thoughts more effectively. Using grammar precisely clarifies thought processes. And using grammar flexibly makes us better communicators.
Globally, there is an evolving consensus that grammar should not be the cornerstone of teaching English in class. The belief is that when students are in the classroom—real or virtual—the focus should be on communication, and not learning grammar. I believe that grammar should be explicitly taught in class. Having a good grasp of the subject is a foundational skill.
In the future, the pendulum may swing back to recognise the importance of teaching grammar. And just maybe, grammar would be glamorous again.
(The writer is Amal Fabian, author of the book Q in the Garden of Grammar)
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