Grammar is not your Mom's mom.

It's funny. We read this Hartwell piece last semester in ENG470, and it wasn't exactly easy to keep track of. Grammar 1, grammar 4, grammar 3b sub theta, I actually found myself wishing for a Venn Diagram. Argh! (and yes, I know that 'argh' good grammar not is.} But now that I'm revisiting it, it was for more enjoyable as well as grabbable. and really, it just reinforced what i was convinced of the first time. Diagramming sentence and knowing about gerunds may be fun and even useful, but it doesn't contribute to making you a good writer. Writing does. Reading does. Caring about what you are writing about does. Heck, if you want to write a long explication of participles, dangling and not (you wierdo!), then the writing will improve your writing.
I like the pseudomagical metaphors used in the grammarians and non-grammarians, or incantation users and alchemists, but I believe I have a similar yet better metaphor for what the so called "alchemical" method is doing. Alchemy was more pseudoscience and each alchemist hid his secrets from the others, but I think of Hartwell more like I think of the way my roommate cooks. He (my roommate) reads about cooking. He watches other people cook. He tries all sorts of different foods and tries to figure out what's in them. But when he actually makes dinner, he never follows a codified recipe. 9 times out of ten, it's mmmmmmmmdelicious. Sometimes it's a dismal failure. But it gets better every time.