American Grammars and Usage Guides

Abstract

Grammar books were the foundation of a good education in early America. A command of grammar was considered an essential first step toward higher learning for children and self-betterment for working-class adults. At a time when books were expensive and hard to come by, grammars were often the only textbooks found in schoolrooms and the only books found in many homes, aside from the family Bible. Grammars were an educational lifeline for those too old or too isolated to attend school. Abraham Lincoln famously began his progress toward a law career by mastering the contents of the most popular grammar books. Grammars began to be widely adopted in America during the 1770s. The first ones came from England, but soon Americans were producing their own. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, hundreds of titles were in circulation, with the most popular selling in the millions. Grammar books covered much more than grammar. Most followed a similar pattern. The first sections introduced the alphabet and simple words. Students then moved on to parts of speech, including noun declensions and verb conjugations based on the system in Latin grammars. These were followed by usage rules, usually including “false syntax” (examples of incorrect grammar, typically taken from the writings of famous authors). Many books also provided a final section of morally improving practice readings. Parsing exercises (identifying the part of speech and grammatical purpose of each word in a sentence) followed the text. Students were expected to memorize and recite the lessons, the usual teaching method of the time. Thus they learned reading, standard grammar, mental discipline, and good moral principles, all from the same textbook. Memorizing grammar rules was thought to prepare students to tackle more advanced subjects like rhetoric and the natural sciences. Although grammar books are no longer a part of a typical education, a number of usage rules first introduced in these books have survived into the twenty-first century, at least as an ideal standard. Americans are still deeply concerned with correct usage, as the many in-print usage guides and grammar advice websites show, and they still respect such rules as the ban on ending a sentence with a preposition and the use of nominative case after be, even if they don’t follow them. In recent decades, standard usage guides have started to base their advice more on actual usage, for example, accepting sentences like It’s me. Nonetheless, most guides still feel the need to warn their users that not everyone agrees with these changes.