Teaching Grammar Doesn't Lead to Better Writing

I found this interesting article today on this website
http://chronicle.com/article/Teaching-Grammar-Doesnt-Lead/27874/
It says The ACT reported recently that college professors rank grammar as the most important skill for students entering college, while high-school teachers consider it the least important. The ACT thinks that this gulf between high college expectations and inadequate high-school instruction explains why almost 20 percent of first-year college students take a remedial writing course.
In Bangladesh, where I was raised, we had a separate Grammar class until High school. I think what we focused on most when we were in kindergarten was the memorization off different types of grammar. And for me personally that was the biggest mistake. We dreaded that class where as we loved our composition classes.
Therefore what Williams says in page 182 about the focus should be on helping students understand the difference between academic language and day to day language is very true.
This chapter gave me a lot of useful tips such as under common usage problems it talks about who and whom. To this day I confuse between who and whom. The examples illustrated the paragraph on who/whom pretty well.
Learning about the four major grammars was interesting for me as I had not learned such forms before. Or at least we did not classify them into four categories in school. The one that made most sense to me is the phase structure grammar. It provides a better depth and analysis of language.
But personally my favorite was the cognitive grammar simply because cognitive grammar rejects the idea that language is rule governed. I love the idea of connectionism. I completely agree that mental activities are primarily imagistic. It is so much easier to match and understand words when we link them to images ( mental representations) when we are younger. And thus no rules are involved.
Overall, a good chapter with a lot of information that I can personally use in the future to get a better understanding of the major types of grammar and the common usage errors.