I am Kyle's self-indulgence

Yesterday I started reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road (It's a wonderful book, by the way--the kind I would stay up all night reading if I didn't have to take care of my 1-year-old son the following morning). Here is the first paragraph:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

As I read this opening what really stood out to me was the grammatical style, and I couldn't help thinking what kind of comments this book would receive if given to a high school English teacher for an assignment. "Fragment. Fragment. Fragment. Don't needs an apostrophe. Fragment."

When I first started teaching English I thought it was important to strike a balance between the necessary evil of teaching formal grammar and my desire to make language exciting and creative for students, although I wasn't always sure of how to do it. I think that one tactic I settled on was teaching students about using different writing styles for different occasions: what is appropriate for a novel may not be appropriate for an academic paper. I still think this is true, but I've always felt there's more to it than just that.

While reading Cormac McCarthy's writing (this is the first novel of his I've read and now I'm wondering why I waited so long) I've figured out a different reason for teaching grammar. What I've realized is that while McCarthy breaks the rules of formal writing, it is not at all chaotic or disorganized. In fact, I would say that he writes in a very consistent style that has its own consistent set of rules. This kind of writing must be very intentional. I'm sure there's a reason he leaves the apostrophes out of contractions like cant, dont and wont, and I'd love to hear him explain what that reason is.

I think that intentionality is the difference between good writing and bad writing. If a student is going to choose to use sentence fragments, it must be a deliberate choice, which requires knowledge of the formal rules of grammar and a clear purpose for violating them. And above all, grammar should be taught with the understanding that any stylistic choices must be made with the audience's reaction in mind.

I think I'll show my students this passage from The Road next time I teach about sentence fragments in a regular education English classroom.