Rhetorical Grammar? You have probably been told at some point that you needed to correct some aspect of your grammar. That is not entirely accurate or true. You have known grammar, understood as the basic rules by which any and all meaningful sentences in a language are produced, since around the age of four; linguists now understand that most of those rules are learned unconsciously and internalized early on. For example: the basic rule in English (as in many other languages, though not all) that a sentence follows the Subject-Verb-Object order. The rules for commas, by contrast, are not grammatical but a matter of convention that becomes complicated (as with all punctuation) after the emergence of printing. What we want to think about and become better adept at, therefore, is something we can call rhetorical grammar: a grasp of the range of the rules, conventions, practices, traditions, figures of speech and writing in English; a grasp that allows the writer to know what to do with those conventions and rules and practices and traditions for the purposes of the writing. We need and want to be rhetorically effective when we write. Rhetorical grammar blends a better understanding of language and writing conventions and traditions with the actual practice of putting those conventions to work (which always includes the potential to violate those conventions knowingly) in our writing. We can read no better model of rhetorical grammar at work in writing, and in a writer's life, than that of Frederick Douglass. The subtitle of Martha Kolln's book Rhetorical Grammar indicates what we are after: "Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects."

The goal of this assignment is to build a database of the choices and effects that a writer can deploy and develop in the context of her writing. You will each pick a specific topic from the large and unwieldy list of conventions and traditions of spoken and written English. You can pick a category that you have wanted or needed to work on: for example, commas (or more specifically, comma splices), or metaphor, or who vs. whom, or alliteration, or gerunds. The point is to make this a more manageable database for the purposes of our writing. I don't know everything there is to know about writing, not even the writing I already know how to do. That's a good thing. When I want to work on some aspects of my writing, for experimentation, for exploration, for refining, for strengthening, I consult a resource such as this. Consulting the resource, I begin to work. The point is to make the machine of writing more visible, once again.