Grammar & Mechanics (Classical)

The classical tradition holds that grammar is the science of language — that command of language reflects clarity of thought, and that imprecise speech betrays imprecise thinking. Eighth grade is the year that conviction comes due. By thirteen or fourteen, a student is ready to be told that the rules they have absorbed for years rest on a coherent system, and that the system can be named, parsed, and used with intention. This program covers nine weeks of that work.

Week 1 begins with the verbals. From the Latin verbum, “word,” a verbal is a word built from a verb that nevertheless functions as another part of speech. There are exactly three — gerund (Latin gerundus, “to be carried out”), participle (particeps, “partaking”), and infinitive (infinitivus, “unbounded”) — and the week teaches each by formal definition before any drill begins. Students parse a passage written in the manner of C.S. Lewis.

Week 2 turns to active and passive voice — activus (driving, doing) against passivus (being acted upon). The week works through transformation drills, then opens onto rhetorical analysis of real Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and George Orwell. Lincoln writes “all men are created equal” in the passive on purpose; Douglass piles up passives in his 1852 Fourth of July speech to keep the focus on victims; Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” targets evasive passives like “Mistakes were made.” Voice is rhetoric.

Week 3 introduces the four moods of the English verb — indicative, imperative, interrogative, and the slippery subjunctive (subjungere, “to yoke beneath”). Students drill counterfactual if-clauses (“if I were”) and demand-clause constructions (“essential that he be present”).

Week 4 takes up rhetorical punctuation: the em dash, the ellipsis, the colon, and the semicolon. These marks are choices, not rules. Models drawn from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Dickinson, and Dickens. Week 5 examines sentence architecture — coordination, subordination, parallelism, periodic and cumulative structures — through Lincoln, Churchill, and Kennedy.

Week 6 is the heart of the classical approach to vocabulary: Greek and Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Students learn spec/spect (look), trahere (draw), bene and mal, chronos, bios, graphein — and a closing word-coining exercise tests whether the parts have been mastered.

Week 7 covers the five principal figures of speech — metaphor (metapherein, “to carry over”), simile, personification, irony (Greek eironeia, “feigned ignorance”), and allusion — analyzed through Lincoln at Gettysburg and Shakespeare. Week 8 distinguishes formal academic, domain-specific, and colloquial registers, treating diction as a discipline of fitness.

Week 9 is the capstone. Students parse and analyze two contrasting passages — one in the style of Annie Dillard, one in the style of C.S. Lewis — and compose an original piece that deliberately employs at least five of the skills mastered across the unit.

Every term is taught with its Latin or Greek etymology. Every example is drawn from real or carefully imitated prose by canonical authors. Full answer keys with detailed explanations included for every worksheet.