Dispensing with the War on Grammar

Perhaps you’ve noticed: instant messaging and social media have not been kind to grammar. Adolescents—and even many adults, yes?—mangle language with carefree abandon, reducing expression to a series of half-formed thoughts, emojis, and abbreviations. The result? A world where clarity dissolves, and the precision of thought erodes.

Yet what if, instead of surrendering to linguistic decay, we launched a counter-offensive? What if, in defiance of casual sloppiness, we reclaimed the structure, beauty, and order of traditional grammar? In fact: this is our goal for all CLASSICAL students: to write well, to think clearly, to reclaim an intellectual independence lost in the static of today’s textual shorthand.

Grammar is not an arbitrary set of rules but the very framework of reasoned thought. The ancients understood this: the Greeks treated grammar as a foundation of philosophy, the Romans insisted on linguistic precision, and medieval scholars saw mastery of language as essential to shaping reality itself. To name a thing properly was to know it; to construct a sentence well was to think clearly.

Today, however, grammatical rigor is often dismissed as outdated or unnecessary. At Cincy Classical, however, we understand that the consequences of abandoning it are serious. When language loses its structure, so too does our ability to reason, persuade, and understand. (Read or re-read Nineteen-Eighty- Four, for example.) Sloppy grammar leads to sloppy thought. But there is a remedy.

A CLASSICAL education revives the noble discipline of language study, beginning with sentence diagramming. Here, students see language’s inner workings—the skeleton of thought laid bare. Parsing sentences, identifying clauses, and mastering parts of speech are not busywork; they are acts of intellectual training. Just as a musician learns scales or an athlete drills fundamentals, a student who masters grammar gains fluency in the art of clear thinking.

Memorization of rules and examples follows, not as mindless rote learning, but as the steady forging of mastery. A student who can distinguish between subjunctive and indicative moods, who understands the elegance of a well-placed semicolon, navigates the world of ideas with confidence and precision.

Copywork and dictation further develop this skill. By studying and reproducing the great prose of history, students internalize the rhythms and structures of excellence. This is no different from an apprentice painter studying the brushstrokes of a master or a musician practicing the works of Bach. Such immersion shapes the mind and refines the ear for language’s music.

Finally, through Socratic discussion and debate, grammar ceases to be a dry subject and becomes a living art. In the clash of ideas, in the careful construction of argument, students learn that words have power. A well-formed sentence is not just correct; it can be persuasive, illuminating, even beautiful.

But the war over grammar is not merely academic. It is cultural, even philosophical. Increasingly, language is treated as flexible, its rules mere suggestions. Consider the rise of singular “they.” No longer just an informal shortcut, it has become a battleground of ideology. Yet to erase grammatical distinctions is to muddy meaning. Precision is cast aside in favor of ambiguity. And when language becomes vague, so does thought.

At CLASSICAL, we resist this drift. We do not see grammar as pedantry, but as an essential safeguard against the intellectual confusion of our age. Our students are taught to wield the semicolon with the precision of a fencer’s blade, constructing sentences that demand patience, discipline, and engagement. They refuse to reduce language to a stream of fragments, believing instead that clarity and order are worth preserving.

We teach our students that grammar is not just a set of rules but a path to clarity, to truth, to wisdom. And in doing so, we are not merely preserving a grammatical tradition; we are preserving the possibility of thought itself. Think about that!

Torches Up!