In university writing feedback, “grammar” is often used to condemn a document without identifying what has gone wrong. A comment such as “the grammar is terrible” sounds technical while giving the student little to revise.
In many cases, this is just plain nonsense. Faculty should know better.
Academics use “grammar” to name many different problems. A student who shifts between two terms for the same concept has a terminology problem. Long, heavily loaded sentences present problems of style and information order. Methods described without a clear procedural sequence present a genre problem. A supervisor’s dislike of first person is a preference.
These are all related matters, I suppose. They belong to the same broad ecology of writing. But they are different matters, and calling them all “grammar” is sloppy and frankly annoying.
Grammar, technically, concerns sentence structure: agreement, tense, word form, sentence boundaries, pronoun reference, modifier placement, you know, the ordinary machinery by which English holds itself together. Everything else belongs elsewhere, which is fine.
Style concerns choices among acceptable options. Genre concerns what a document is expected to do in a given time and place. Disciplinary convention concerns the often varied habits of a field, such as how evidence is introduced, how claims are hedged, or how writers signal membership in a scholarly conversation. And preference, well, preference concerns the private irritations of a reader who may have mistaken long acquaintance with a convention for divine revelation.
“Grammar” sounds objective. “I dislike this style,” “this does not meet the convention I expected,” or “I need the argument staged differently” makes the reader’s role in the judgment visible. Those comments are more accurate and require more explanation.
Capable graduate students arrive at writing support with a diagnosis too vague to be useful, sometimes after a failed defence or proposal. Some have already been told that they need remedial help. A graduate student with years of specialized work deserves a more exact account of the problem.
Writing centres can help, of course. I mean, we want to help. They can help students interpret feedback that was never clear to begin with, identify recurring patterns, revise for clarity, manage reader expectations, develop strategies for editing their own work. They can turn “awkward” into a question about sentence subjects, paragraph focus, or the order in which old and new information appears. Sometimes they can help a student see that a committee’s complaint about grammar actually concerns terminology, signposting, density, or the unstable relationship between claims and evidence.
But what writing centres should resist, what universities should stop asking of them, is the conversion of vague faculty dissatisfaction into emergency remediation. A student sent for “editing” may need a copy editor, disciplinary guidance, protected writing time, or a supervisor willing to say what they mean. Sending that student to writing support under the banner of grammar does damage beyond the obvious, delaying the real work, and preserving the fantasy that the problem lives only in the student. And it lets everyone else off the hook.
This fantasy is especially convenient in graduate education, where students pay tuition for supervision while also providing labour that sustains labs, grants, teaching, and publications. When a student’s writing time is squeezed by lab work, employment demands, funding deadlines, and the kind of uneven supervision that leaves them guessing about what their supervisor actually wants, the resulting document should be read as a product of those conditions. The student still has responsibilities, of course. And yes, standards still matter.
But we’re letting standards become theatre at this point. The institution creates the conditions for rushed writing, constrains the student’s time, withholds clear feedback, demands production, and then calls the residue “bad grammar” and sends the student to fix themselves.
If the issue is grammar, identify the pattern, preferably in the actual document, with specifics. If the issue is style, name the style concern and why it matters. If the issue is genre, explain the convention you’re invoking and whether you’re willing to defend it. If the issue is terminology, ask for a term sheet. If the issue is copy editing, and this one matters, don’t call it grammar. Say so, after substantive revisions are complete, because the student needs to know they’ve been sent back for a different kind of work. If the issue is preference, own the preference. Own it fully. Think about other ways you can mentor the student instead of sending them into a depressive spiral over a judgment you wouldn’t even admit is yours.
Graduate students deserve accurate names for the work being asked of them. They should leave feedback with tasks, priorities, examples, and a better sense of “what the reader is actually struggling with.” They should not leave with a grand verdict on their competence disguised as a comment on grammar, or on anything else that lets you avoid saying what you mean.
Earlier: “Enough with the fallacy police”.