E. B. White Quotes

A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

Grammar is the analysis of language.

How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.

Grammar, which can govern even Kings.

No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.

Grammar is the grave of letters.

Logic is to grammar what the sense of words is to their sound.

Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.

Grammar, which knows how to lord it over kings, and with high hands makes them obey its laws.

Learning is the dictionary, but sense the grammar of science.

By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words.... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.

Grammar is...the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.

With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semicolin; it's a useful little chap

The task of the educator is to make the child's spirit pass again where its forefathers have gone, moving rapidly through certain stages but suppressing none of them. In this regard, the history of science must be our guide.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

Such knowledge is probably gained in several ways. One process undoubtedly operates through social comparison of success and failure experiences. Children repeatedly observe their own behavior and the attainments of others

I once asked him what came at the end of the sentence... and he said "parole".

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

You can't find me 20 children in Chicago, I don't care which section you go in - you can be on Michigan Avenue or here - and they won't be able to tell you that y is a vowel when it's the final syllable in a word, as in Nancy and icy. And no one bothers to teach the rules anymore - "i before e except after c."

I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons