If you ask students how they feel about grammar, you’re likely to hear, “Oh. I’m so bad at grammar. It’s always marked in big red ink all over my essay.” Grammar has become the villain in the ELA classroom. Why? Because students associate grammar with one thing: being wrong.

It’s completely understandable. Grammar is one of the only objective aspects of an ELA classroom, and students think about it mainly when points are deducted from their essays, tests, or worksheets.

However, grammar doesn’t have to be the villain if we turn it into instruction rather than punishment. Here are some tips to make grammar instruction less scary and more scaffolded.

Pick Your Grammatical Battles

It’s hard to read a student essay and not want to point out everything that needs fixing. If you look at essays and think, “Where do I even start?” just remember that you don’t have to fix everything at once. Let the mistakes become data for your instruction, rather than a tally for what’s going wrong.

At the beginning of the school year, ask students to complete a “diagnostic” paragraph. Grade the paragraph for everything except grammar, but take notes. Tally the top five biggest mistakes you see across the essays, and make those your goals for the year. Present your findings to the class, and lay out a plan to fix these mistakes over time. Now, you can create mini-lessons customized to your particular class. This approach gives students targeted objectives to improve upon, rather than a moving goalpost of grammatical expectations.

Alternatively, talk to your fellow teachers in the ELA department. Consider coming up with a list of goals for each grade level: 9th grade will fix comma splices and subject-verb agreement; 10th grade will work on parallelism and sentence structure; and so on. That way, every teacher isn’t stressing over every mistake, and you’re sharing the load over the years, instead of overwhelming students, and yourselves, all at once.

Teach Grammar Through Real Writing

Once you’ve identified your class’s biggest grammatical struggles or goals, approach lessons with the aim of improving writing, not just teaching a grammar concept.

Consider your students’ writing problem, and make the lesson applicable. Instead of introducing coordinating conjunctions with no context, begin with “Some of our sentences feel choppy. How can we connect ideas without simply adding ‘and’?” Now, introduce the grammatical concept as the solution to their writing problem.

Once you clearly identify the grammatical tool that can solve the awkwardness in their writing, students can see how this lesson is directly applicable to them. Have them practice and then rewrite their diagnostic paragraph using this new skill, helping them see active improvement in their writing. Seeing these differences side-by-side will hopefully boost their confidence that they can master grammar one step at a time.

Grammar Can Be a Vehicle for Better Writing

Grammar rules exist for a reason, and it’s important that students learn them so they understand how to bend them for creative purposes as they find their voice as writers. Different sentence structures, intentional pauses, parallel structure, etc., once understood, can be used for a variety of purposes.

For example, it might be tempting to teach students to expand beyond simple sentences. But in reality, writers use simple sentences for clarification and urgency. Fragments are generally considered a mistake, but when used artfully, they can create emphasis. We usually want students to use active voice and avoid passive voice, but in a lab report, passive voice is preferred, as readers are more concerned about the results of an experiment rather than who was doing it.

As an extension, let students experiment with different forms of grammar to illustrate the effect of those choices. Ask them to mimic the style of famous authors who play with grammar. Emphasize that there is a time and a place for every kind of sentence, but that variety is the spice of both life and writing.

Remember the Grammar Goals

Grammar doesn’t have to be the part of writing that students, or teachers, dread. When we teach it as a tool for stronger writing, students can understand why it matters. When they see that they can express an idea more clearly, make a stronger argument, give a more precise description, and construct a more deliberate rhythm, the feeling of success will override the fear of the dreaded red pen. Remember, the goal isn’t to create writers who never make grammatical mistakes, it’s to create writers who understand that every sentence is a meaningful choice.

If you want to get specific with your students’ grammar goals, consider checking out our workbook series Ten Days to A+ Grammar. Each Ten Days to A+ Grammar guide will help you tackle core grammar concepts using step-by-step daily lessons filled with examples, lecture notes, and questions designed to prompt class responses.