Specifically, A White Bear, who responded to this supercilious column on the importance of grammar (it allows us to pass ourselves off as refined, of course) with a wonderful post. Notwithstanding her totally unwarranted and unfair criticism of From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, A White Bear suggests that:

To me, “bad writing” is not that which appears low-class, as Kilpatrick suggests, but that which shows an inflexible dedication to habits limited by a poor grasp of how language works. Bad writing does not just “make mistakes,” although, sure, grammatical mistakes make sentences woefully ambiguous where they could be incisive. Bad writing is that which displays a narrow set of choices. It is formulaic because it only knows one formula. Mistakes like dangling modifiers (for which I should have been jailed in college) show that the writer could not imagine reorganizing the sentence in another way to make it clearer. Learning some basic grammatical and syntactical rules helps a writer to think more nimbly and creatively about sentences.

I like to tell my students that learning grammar is not about imprisoning their “natural talents” or “individual voices” or whatever, but about liberating them by giving them more options. When you have a language for talking about syntax and parts of speech, you can ask questions like, “What do I want to be the subject of this sentence?” and “Would restructuring this information into an adverbial clause be more interesting than tacking on adjectives?” Grammatical study destroys some of the romance of the unadulterable utterance, but it, perhaps ironically, provides a structure within which a writer can make conscious choices.

This struck me as so right the first time I read it that I almost jumped out of my recliner. But my recliner is comfy. And I’m getting too old to do much jumping. Regardless, A White Bear nails it: grammar is about choices. Which reminds me of a particular class during my first year of graduate school, when the great and good Volker Berghahn discussed, in painstaking detail, his note-taking methods. Upon finishing his explanation, Volker smiled and said, “I find my system liberating.” At the time I couldn’t get beyond the irony. But now, I think Berghahn meant what A White Bear means: familiarity with a complex but flexible system is not about circumscribing options but creating new ones. Anyway, read the post. It’s good.