ABSTRACT
Richards may of course not me an his recommendation about not teaching traditional grammar to be taken literally. He might rephrase his objection as one against too great concentration on grammar in schools at present. But I think his bias is very evident. Grammar, in part, is stated to be either irrelevant or ridiculous. The latter charge is often put forward in a way that offends against his own canons of interpretation. It is a feature of his exercises that only short passages can be presented for criticism. When his intention is ho stile, it is very easy to give an impression of arbitrariness by this device. By omitting the historical and theoretical context, Richards makes the grammarians look like muddled pedants.1 Similar considerations apply to the "cocoa-nut-shy" with which he starts the section. The exhibits he presents are criticisms of the grammatical construction of short extracts. I believe the comments he makes are just, but, except in the ca se of aperverse criticism of a beautiful piece of observation by Ruskin, the examples he gives are trivial. Indeed, with this one exception, all the pieces of writing he defends against grammarians in this book are undistinguished, and not such that they could not be improved.
