I don’t really teach grammar. Sometimes when students write “something was done,” I comment, “done by whom? Avoid the passive voice” and link to Purdue OWL on the passive voice, but certainly not for entry-level undergraduate writers. If a sentence isn’t clear, I ask for clarification. I do sometimes comment that students should avoid fragments or run-ons, but I admit that I think a better practice would be to ask what the nounal clause in the fragment is doing, or to ask a student to break up a complex idea (code for a run-on, in this case). I tell students that grammar matters insofar as it helps aide clarity, and otherwise, it doesn’t matter very much. Reading their drafts aloud can help with this, I explain, as it can also help with sniffing out where their ideas lose or gain coherence or excitement. I do tell students to reread also, to ask family members, friends, roommates, and classmates to read, to take home extra peer review worksheets for these purposes, and to run spell-check, which, I explain, doesn’t catch everything and needs to be tended with a critical eye because it, too, is imperfect, but it’s a start. And everything needs to be read with a critical eye anyway. When I teach Hunter’s version of 1121, which they call 220, Introduction to Writing about Literature (and which doubles as a required course for English majors in addition to fulfilling Pathways gen ed requirements), I try to explain to students terms like “antecedent” and “pronoun” because these terms are useful to refer to the motifs we trace through a text, and sometimes I’ll explain “parallel construction” or “gerunds.” But I’m pretty likely too to just say “-ing verbs acting as nouns,” and I tell students that so long as they describe what they see in words that are clear to their readers, it doesn’t matter to me that they use so-called official terms for the literary techniques (so-called “devices”), methods, or grammatical practices they observe. They just need to make it clear to me what it is they are writing about. And grammar, and the words for it, are but one way to do that.