Bringing Grammar to Life Without Rote Drills

Students have absorbed novel methods of pretending to know what they don’t.

Even before the explosion of aggressively marketed AI tools, they could click through a document in Grammarly to swiftly eliminate flagged errors in syntax, subject-verb agreement, word choice, punctuation, and capitalization.

Now, the same platform’s tempting generative AI feature can instantly produce a convincing writing “glow up” with zero deliberation. Make it authoritative, make it confident, make it persuasive—a learning-free, vibes-oriented revision ordered up like a deli sandwich.

It’s worth noting, however, that students’ struggling with grammar conventions isn’t a new thing. Nearly two decades ago, when researchers Andrea Lunsford and Karen Lunsford published a study examining writing from first-year college students, they concluded, “Contrary to what the doomsayers would have us believe, the rate of student error is not increasing precipitously but, in fact, has stayed stable for nearly one hundred years.”

Still, if tech innovations have made grammar, usage, and mechanics so easy to fake, should teachers still prioritize introducing kids to what English professor Brock Haussamen called “the skunk at the garden party of the language arts”? Is harping on, say, proper adjective placement a valuable use of class time, or akin to using an abacus when a graphing calculator sits on the desk?

For the first few years of my own teaching practice, I characterized grammar as the “paint job” of writing, the professional sheen for quality ideas that would otherwise appear disorganized and incoherent. Grammar drills were no fun—fine—but you shouldn’t risk an uncharitable judgment of your abilities, I’d assure students. Mastering grammar and proofreading were passports to being taken seriously.

Similarly, Carly Lamp, a former 11th-grade teacher who now creates instructional content, echoed that messaging with her students. “What you say and what you write represents you,” she’d tell them. “It is important that you represent yourself in the best way possible to show that you are capable, sharp, and conscientious.”

Yet, in 2026, when online influencers amass huge followings using little text and no formal attention to writing conventions, this argument can be a harder sell.

Writing is the discovery and organization of thinking into language. Grammar, usage, and mechanics are thus inseparable from eloquent communication—anything from a piercing argument to a compelling narrative. One doesn’t teach grammar in isolation to make students write better, a fact that renowned educator George Hillocks Jr. confirmed when he published a 1986 meta-analysis of 2,000 studies on student writing and concluded that “we can no longer accept the teaching of grammar as being conducive to improving the quality of writing.”

Instead, through games, mentor texts, student-designed reference guides, and other strategies, teaching these tools as simply aspects of a writing practice breaks an often daunting process down to foundational elements—without resorting to drills.

These lessons can be as engaging as creative writing tasks, teachers told me. In spirit, they complement them, and by seeing sentence construction and word choice as linked to identity and voice, students may lose interest in shortcuts that both degrade their ability to think, according to a 2025 MIT study on “cognitive debt,” and dilute that self they discover, one piece of writing at a time.

Teaching grammar in and out of context

In my first year of teaching, I was asked to teach Grammar Lab, a yearlong required elective for ninth graders that involved presiding over a software curriculum of drills and quizzes. When I eventually assigned a brief essay, I discovered that students could only haphazardly apply the rules they had supposedly mastered.

Students don’t need a deluge of terminology and rules but instead tools that “enrich and enhance” their writing, according to Constance Weaver, the late author of Teaching Grammar in Context. “Grammar is more than correctness, and the teaching of grammar should emphasize and open up possibilities for expression,” Weaver writes.

As Hillocks found, simply being aggressively schooled in grammar rules doesn’t help. Linguists would be the world’s best writers if simply knowing the rules translated to their most stirring application, Dr. Kelsey Hammond, a professional development coach for the Center for the Professional Education of Teachers, told me, quoting Patrick Hartwell’s 1985 article “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar.”

It was no wonder that my students, eager to complete my Grammar Lab class, would fail to retain knowledge or improve their writing. In 1980, Finlay McQuade, then a teacher, shared results from a secondary school class devoted to grammar instruction. His students actually made more mechanics errors on an essay assigned after they’d taken his course than on one submitted at the beginning. Furthermore, McQuade saw a marked dip in overall writing quality. “Their sentences are awkwardly and I believe self-consciously constructed to honor correctness above all other virtues, including sense,” he writes.

Drills of a sort may have a place—so long as teachers aren’t subjecting students to dreary routines they prefer not to recall from their own schooling.

Like me, when he was in middle school, Pennsylvania teacher and writer Brett Vogelsinger diagrammed sentences—a pretty traditional dreary routine. “I didn’t like it, but I did learn how to break down pieces of things,” he says. More than the lessons themselves, he believes that mindset helped him become a good writer. Today, Vogelsinger aims for a “middle ground” between teaching grammar in context and the skills-centered direct instruction to which his district has gravitated post-pandemic. This means that, yes, sometimes his ninth graders do lessons on grammar that are not directly associated with a writing task. This could include repairing run-on sentences for practice or memorizing essential rules—like what constitutes a complete sentence—through a game.

For knowledge to stick, students need repetition, a chance to recall and reapply prior lessons in an increasingly complex context. Matthew Johnson resists relegating grammar to brief, utilitarian reviews—a common teacher approach to handling the “skunk.” An English teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the author of Good Grammar: Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons That Work for More Students, Johnson returns to each essential grammar principle four or five times over a year. “The human brain is such that if you do something once and don’t come back to it, you’re unlikely to remember it,” says Johnson.

He first establishes a routine of weekly lessons, always leading with the broader context: for example, why do we need to know how to use punctuation? Students then learn that they already naturally use punctuation to organize the flow of oral communication, but that command of cadence doesn’t easily shift to writing.

Therefore, for Johnson, the emphasis should be on how to adapt existing knowledge for a different communication task, to refine students’ approach and voice. Grammar is never disconnected from actual writing, even when lessons appear to address it out of context.

Mentor Texts as Reference Points

A mentor text can train that ear. Whether it’s written by a published author, teacher, or student, encountering a model for following, abusing, or slyly subverting grammar conventions can give students a genuine and even inspirational reference point, allowing them to “see structures they might want to try out,” says Hammond, who was formerly a middle school teacher.

Hammond has her students read Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” a 650-word story in one single sentence shepherded along by semicolons. Once the class has defined such an element of style, Hammond might then have students write lines in imitation. While one would never punctuate like Kincaid for a newspaper article, she tells her students, professional writers often reject broadly accepted dogmas for conventions. It helps to first know the rules, in order to be able to reap the poetic benefits of rejecting them.

“I love voice,” Hammond says. For teen students in the midst of their own identity development, seeing the once-dreary nuts and bolts of writing as key pieces of an inimitable voice is more interesting than simply trying to be “correct.” Can that require an intentional “divergence from traditional rules”? Hammond asks her students, before pivoting to bell hooks as an example of a writer whose attitude toward punctuation and capitalization matched her content, a voice springing from daring choices, the aim being the disruption of a power structure.

One effective mentor text lesson that I like using in my literature classes involves displaying on the projector a retyped portion of a chapter or essay that the class has read. Individual students take turns reading aloud as the teacher makes focused changes while maintaining other variables—removing commas in one version, perhaps, or, in another, splitting every complex or compound sentence into multiple simpler ones.

Students can hear how text morphs, noting that multiple versions may be “right,” and yet some prove more readable than others.

Attending to Grammar (and Proofreading) When There’s an End Goal

The proofreading process can be the rushed icing on the cake of a writing assignment. If they don’t risk a penalty for never submitting a draft, some students will turn in a “final” version at the last minute for enough credit to preserve grade book equilibrium. I have been known to guarantee at least one round of meaningful edits simply by lying about due dates.

Hammond, who recently completed her PhD at Teachers College at Columbia University, counsels students not to edit while drafting, but to go back through with an “intentional eye” for specific issues. “Typing empowers us to edit in waves, but we don’t need to make sure each sentence is perfect,” she says.

As part of his classes’ editing process, Brett Vogelsinger has students print drafts and wander a field on campus, reading aloud in semiprivacy until they’re able to return to class more sensitive to the consequences of sentence construction choices. “The ear is the best editor,” he says.

The antiquated cliché of strict teachers then grimly painting those drafts with red ink doesn’t serve student writing, according to Carly Lamp. Instead of signifying rigor, demands for exhaustive edits overwhelm students. Lamp particularly likes an activity that she calls “essay ambulance,” in which a teacher skims submissions and identifies just three major issues with grammar, usage, or mechanics. In a demo, a teacher pulls out representative sentences to fix. Students can participate and then, with a manageable goal in mind, patch the same problems in their own drafts.

According to Hammond, students care more about patching those problems when they’re writing for publication—texts with an authentic purpose and audience. As the teacher of a journalism course, I can confirm her conviction. When a real byline is at stake, students readily commit to proofreading.

A highlight of Matt Johnson’s approach is a “grammar book” that each student maintains, documenting and organizing the year’s lessons in rhetoric, style, and conventions. This is a publication of a sort, and having each student take charge of the design and organization matters. “They put a book together in a way that is personal,” Johnson says. Each student can leave Johnson’s ninth-grade class with a helpful guide, an archive that reflects a burgeoning understanding of the organizational and learning strategies that work best for them.

The Spirit of Play and Creating a Self, One Sentence at a Time

Before I started teaching, I reconnected with my AP Composition teacher. A memorable fan of red ink, she gifted me a vintage poster set: the “Seven Deadly Sins of Bad Writing,” which railed against everything from dangling modifiers to apostrophe misuse. Though I still echo her advice circa 1998—like finding strong verbs instead of turning to pileups of adjectives—“sin” is a harsh label, not a morale-booster.

Grammar needs a rebranding. Even without drills, my old “paint job” analogy reinforced tedium, but why not change perceptions? “Grammar is not a boring thing when it applies to writing,” says Vogelsinger.

Attending to how we speak about grammar is a good place to start. Johnson speaks of “playing with clauses,” invoking a spirit of adventure I’ve often hoped students would embrace in my class. Extending that playful approach, he has students “build out” from a short sentence like “I played Legos” by adding details—what was constructed, when this happened, and so on—to explore the utility of commas and also the logic of construction choices. “Where we put information in a sentence matters in terms of how it feels, how it makes sense,” Johnson says.

Johnson argues that the best AI deterrent is students realizing that they walk into class with their own idiolect—a unique pattern of language use shaped by education, experience, and culture. “They learn how to replicate and refine that in writing,” says Johnson. “Their individual communication is a tapestry of everyone in their lives, whereas AI is an average of things.”

Any student has a singular voice, a unique perspective that, once understood, can never really be imitated. Every well-crafted lesson in grammar, usage, and mechanics has the potential to emphasize that understanding and to help students refine that voice—because the capacity to find language for thoughts and feelings is a unique human gift, a power in which to take pride. “Your voice carries weight,” Hammond says.

On some level, it’s a marketing campaign—to get students to believe that they already know more than they think. “It’s not about me teaching you new things, but you recognizing what you know and then taking the next steps to use it to the fullest extent of its power,” says Johnson. “It’s you, but you get to spend time with it. That’s cool—you get to put that out into the world.”