by Jennie Ruby
Teaching or writing training materials can sometimes feel like making students memorize a rulebook: "Never place a comma between the subject and the verb." "The verb must match the subject in person and in number." And so on.
When teaching grammar, for example, I can sometimes hear myself sounding like a soccer coach teaching beginning soccer: "The game starts with a kick-off." "Only 11 players are allowed on the field at one time." But in grammar teaching, as in soccer coaching, and probably as in every kind of training, there are different kinds of rules.
The first kind of rule is one that is so self-evident you seldom have to teach it, because it is common knowledge in the population you are teaching. For instance, almost no one in my classes needs help fixing what is wrong with this sentence:
Dog the bit bone the.
It is so obvious how to fix this that students always already know it: the word the goes before the noun, not after it. You don't even have to actually state the rule. Similarly, anyone who is barely familiar with soccer knows you have to kick, not throw, the ball (unless you are the goalie or you are doing a "throw-in"). I just read an entire web page claiming to give the 17 basic rules of soccer, and the rule about mostly kicking, not throwing, the ball was not even mentioned.
A second kind of rule is an "official" rule. These are the kinds of rules codified in a rulebook: "a soccer ball must be between 68 and 70 centimeters in circumference and have a weight between 410 and 450 grams," or "the indefinite pronoun one is always singular."
A third kind of rule is not so much a rule as it is advice: "Don't start a sentence with based on"; "lock your ankle, hit the ball with the leather of the front of your shoe, and power through." These last rules might better be called best practices. They describe the best way to achieve something, but if you do it wrong the only penalty is that you are less likely to succeed–in creating a grammatically correct sentence, or in kicking the ball a great distance accurately.
Recognizing these different kinds of rules can help keep training materials from sounding too rule-bound, and the "official" rules can be relegated to sidebars or appendixes, where they serve more as references than as the core concepts of the class.
In my grammar classes, I try to separate the "official" rules from the best practices, without wasting any time on the "common knowledge" rules. You can see this technique in action in any of my live, online grammar or writing classes.