I've been a voracious reader for most of my life. My English skills were pretty good, probably because of the reading and the family I was born into. In the 8th grade I sort of started to get the idea of adjectives and adverbs in English, but 9th grade was the breakthrough for me: I took Latin.

My vocabulary improved some, of course, due to the many Latin-influenced words in English. But my understanding of how language works was truly formed by learning the "rules" of Latin grammar. Tenses, number agreement, modifiers, prepositions, pronouns - whew, did I learn to know what those were!

I have to agree with the author of the article in the NYT: if you can't understand the sentence, what matters the content? Both are important, having something worth saying and saying in a way that others can comprehend. Good luck to him teaching pupils to understand how language works!



What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -Ursula K. Le Guin, author (1929- )