Leaving school without a basic grasp of grammar in the 90s

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That’s it really. I even managed to get a degree. Thankfully my first job in the civil service, they gave us all grammar training. I managed to get through a state education with a national curriculum that didn’t teach grammar. Therefore, if like me your school education didn’t include grammar - when did you realise and how did you overcome it later (if you ever did)?

I was educated much earlier than that and given that my attendance record was pretty good I'm not sure when it was taught. I remember being lost in French and German classes and not knowing what a past participle was.

Me. Left a grammar school in 1994 having not being taught any grammar

i know that verbs are doing and adjectives are describing, but I think I learnt that after I finished school. No idea what they actually taught is in English, I got a B in English language!

Yes. It was ridiculous. I remember my parents realising I knew nothing about Grammar so they paid for an English tutor for a while. But I still know it's a huge area of weakness.

Also this! I ended up working with lots of oxbridge contractors in my 20s whilst in the civil service. I spoke differently, felt I couldn’t write and I remember just feeling so uneducated.

But I’m much too old to have experienced ‘fronted adverbials’

Hmmm. My parents both went to school in the 50s and had a very solid grounding in basic grammar (both at primary and grammar school) and have been most bemused at some of the SPAG crap that my kids have been doing for homework! They say 'fronted adverbials' were never taught to them in the 50s, so this isn't some 'harking back' to the good old days!

I'm all for a good comprehensive curriculum with verbs/adjectives/adverbs/articles/prepositions etc, but I think a lot of the stuff schools are forced to teach (because Michael Gove decided they sounded good), is tripe. Michael Rosen has a lot to say about this as well!

More consolidation of basic facts (with fewer made up bolloxy terms) and a focus on developing a love for reading should be the focus.

Has anyone found any easy to follow resources to help with this? I’m now writing reports for work and it’s something I know I need to improve.

I did GCSEs in 1993, A levels in 1995 and didn't learn anything about grammar. Anything I have learned has been through reading. I suspect I understand most of the concepts and how to be grammatically correct, but don't know the 'titles'.

Yep, me too. I write a lot as part of my job, I've picked most of it up - but I often don't know the rules behind usage. Some things I have to look up.

I'm glad it's taught now, it helps with learning other languages.

I was at prep school in the mid 70s.
We had to 'parse' sentences. We wrote them one word per line and next to each word we had to say the part they played in the sentence.

That’s an interesting perspective, @JingleAllTheWayToBed. Informed conversation on world events was ‘normal’ around my childhood family dining table - not as an aspirational building block but just as an organic element of everyday life. My highly educated immigrant parents had a lot to say about the world; the house was filled with books and newspapers and professional journals, Radio 4 was always on, relatives and friends were always arriving from different continents - being able to express yourself cogently, with references, was a given.

That background certainly played into the careers I later pursued.

Same. I’ve written and edited scientific papers and articles, written marketing materials and briefing notes..the list goes on. All the back of a 90s education that didn’t extend beyond a ‘verb is a doing word’. It really comes down to reading a lot and that unfortunately is the problem today.

I'm middle class, state educated untill 13 in good schools with a middle-class learning cohort - I didn't get taught grammar either.

I switched to the private sector at 13, I'm sure those kids were taught, but probably before I arrived.

I think it was a 70s - 90s thing in the state sector.

Ha. I think 'verb is a doing word' is about all I got - I'd forgotten that phrase!

I think you are right that reading saved most of us.

I guess now they have grammerly..

I don't think we didn't learn grammar exactly, we just didn't learn the terms for different types of words. We still learned how to write and speak well.

I learnt the proper terms and structures via Latin and Spanish.

I see adverts for grammerly (US English) floating about - I'd google alternatives for that and try one with good reviews.

I did learn grammar at primary school. I then went out of area to secondary. I was good at languages, but honestly I think it's because I understood the structures in my own native language as a point of reference. Try and conjugate a verb in a second language when you don't even know what a verb is! I left secondary school in 2000. Even at A level I did English and the teacher had to stop the lesson and explain to a group of 16 year old English students what a noun is, the difference between concrete and abstract (using the Squeeze song Tempted -great teacher). I was shocked tbh as the entry requirements for that sixth form we're quite high. My primary school was small, gravy maintained and in an area of high social and economic deprivation, so no idea why others in much 'naicer' areas didn't cover it.

I have made a living as a writer and lack of grammar has never held me back. I am, however, struggling with learning German as I don't understand e.g. cases. I can recognise the dative case in German and understand how word endings need to change but I only have a hazy idea of what the dative actually is. Even when I look it up, I don't seem to retain the information.

I managed to get through GCSEs, A Levels including one called 'English Language and Literature' and an English degree with my only grammar knowledge being that a verb is a doing word and a noun is a naming word. I then worked as a TEFL teacher and that was when I learned grammar. I'm pleased that it's being taught in schools now. But, I do think that the finer intricacies are being taught in a way that is much too prescriptive, using blanket rules over too wide an area to the point of inaccuracy in some instances and, crucially, in a manner that stifles the individual voice. Which is a problem, because surely the whole point of learning how to use grammar correctly is to be able to communicate effectively.

Teaching grammar definitely fell out of favour in the 80s/90s.

It started to fall out of favour in the '70s. I did teacher training then and we were told you mustn't correct SPAG because it stifles their creativity. This was also the time when phonics wasn't used to teach reading and children's fiction was supposed to be 'relevant' to the lives of children reading it. 'Relevant' was one of the buzzwords of the time. (So you don't read fiction partly to learn about people whose lives are different from yours....) So out went boarding school stories, adventure stories, pony stories and so on, and Enid Blyton was right out, and instead children were supposed to want to read about children just like them who grew up on council estates in inner cities.

Then along came Harry Potter, and guess what? Children do want to read boarding school stories, adventure stories and about children whose lives are quite different from theirs.

I went through primary school in 70's and didn't get taught it either. It was a trendy new thing that we would pick it up by osmosis. The stuff my dc did was all new to me!

My XH would be in that cohort, and as for most people it was when he came in contact with people from other countries who had a thorough grounding in grammar.

When he tried to learn foreign languages as an adult he had to learn the building blocks of languages - because educators in the UK deliberately short changed hundreds of thousands of young people to make themselves feel special. It’s a disgrace.

I was privately educated in the 70’s and 80’s and experienced pretty poor grammar teaching too, so don’t think it was just state schools.

When I went to university to study a foreign language and realised that I didn’t have a clue about how language was constructed. Grammar lessons were a complete mystery to me. Managed to get a place on the course off the back off a D at GSCE in Spanish and a CPVE in conversational Italian. Everyone on my course had done A level Latin and French (nearly all privately educated) and I somehow scraped through it all and got a 2:2. When I look back it was a big achievement, not quite sure how I managed it!

We didn’t do it at all, made helping DD with her GCSE English difficult and I got an A in mine!

The dative is the indirect object - so if I gave you a pen, I would be the subject (the nominative), the pen is the object (the accusative, so the thing having the verb done to them) and you are the indirect object - so in English we’d most likely use to.

Also in German and other languages with cases (as far as I know) there are prepositions which take the dative as well like mit (with). I’ll save dual case prepositions for another day ;)