Hi again! I'm Missy Davis is a veteran high school English teacher of 19 years. 

For the first 7 or 8 years of my career I pretended that grammar instruction was not part of my job description, as I had no idea how to teach it or why it mattered. 

At some point though, I realized that grammar instruction could be a tool for helping students develop their writing voice if they understood how words could work powerfully together to reveal ideas, imagery, and meaning. 

Recently I've been fascinated by the idea that writers who have a strong voice must take risks in their writing, and I bring that into grammar instruction more and more to help students embrace grammar as not simply a set of rules to follow but a way to explore and play with language.