A Timeline of Events Covered in
Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction
by Robert J. Connors

1831 — Alexis de Tocqueville tours the US, sees many elementary schools but few institutions of higher learning. He remarks, “There is no other country in the world where, proportionally to population, there are so few ignorant and so few learned individuals as in America.”

1840 — Americans become concerned about their speaking and writing habits. Pedagogies incorporate exercises in “false syntax”. Students are given grammatical errors in the hope of identifying and correcting them. “Proper usage” becomes a requirement in all writing and speech.

1847 — Seth T. Hurd roams the countryside giving public lectures on grammar. He feeds “linguistic anxiety” by pointing out “very low phrases” and “barbarisms” in common English.

1864 — Henry Alford, Dean of Westminster and noted British intellectual writes a book outlining the deterioration of English and blames America.

1870s — Colleges gradually switch from teaching rhetoric to teaching grammar, which proves to be burdensome for many professors. Rather than reviewing papers for construction of ideas, thesis and logic, professors spend their hours, marking grammatical errors.

1874 — Harvard Examinations — Students entering Harvard can write but have poor punctuation and grammar.

1907 — Edwin C. Woolley’s Handbook of Composition: A Compendium of Rules spawns a new age of publishing handbooks on grammar and mechanics.

1910 — The meaning of the word “correct” changes from meaning “socially acceptable” to meaning “formally acceptable”.

1944 — Communications courses are widely adopted by schools as a way to regain the ideals of rhetoric and set aside concentration on mechanics.

1953 — Barriss Mills’ Writing as Process paves the way for more contemporary views of composition by outing and condemning the “police-force concept of usage” with regard to mechanics over substance. “Nothing is more blighting to natural and functional written communication than an excessive zeal for purity of usage in mechanics,” Mills argued.