THE TUTOR'S TALE

When novelist Richard Mason turned to tutoring to cure his writer's angst, he found a lost generation for whom a comma is a historical curiosity.

He blames the government The problem with being a writer is that you can't complain about it. There's not a lot of sympathy on offer for someone who never has to wear a suit, sit in traffic, or deal with the fallout from office politics. When my hardworking friends with proper jobs collapse into their chairs, BlackBerrys zinging, on the rare occasions I can persuade them to keep me company on a week night, I'm too embarrassed to confess how much of my time I spend envying them.

It's not the obvious perks I'm after, either. They can keep their regular salaries and attentive assistants, their frequent flyer upgrades and corporate hospitality. What I want is what my friends hate: a boss, an office, a few minutes' gossip beside an out-of- order espresso machine. The novelist's complaints isolation, insecurity, existential angst are well rehearsed. You spend several years working in a vacuum. Then, all at once, everyone has an opinion on what you've done. For a month, people you've never met discuss you in print; and then, failing a call from a Hollywood studio or the siren lure of a literary award, silence falls.

Recently, I decided to act on my late-night fantasies of office employment.

Perhaps part-time English teaching would be a workable compromise? At least it would get me out of the house.

Becoming a tutor is easier than you might think.

I reached for the Yellow Pages and called a few tutorial agencies. Roughly half of them asked for a CV; only one asked for, or checked, my references.

Fortunately I'm not a paedophile looking for unsupervised access to children, but if I was I wouldn't have been able to believe my luck. The fact that I was prepared to work on a voluntary basis and that I had experience setting up and running the Kay Mason Foundation, an educational charity in South Africa probably worked in my favour. I soon had a number of pupils, ranging in age from 12 to 20. My first was a British-born Asian call Rattna, in her second year at university. 'None of my family knows about these lessons,' she confided as she sat down at my kitchen table. 'My dad would die if he knew I was alone in a room with another man.' I thought Rattna was articulate and bright, and I loved the homemade curry she brought me as payment in kind.

Then I read a batch of her essays and saw that nothing remained in her written work of the quirky intelligence she displayed in conversation. Her inability to punctuate made her prose difficult to follow, and all academic niceties footnotes, correctly displayed quotations etc had been abandoned. Now, at university, the poor quality of her writing was becoming a major problem.

not a grammar fascist, but try making sense of a sentence with no commas ('Hobbies include cooking my grandchildren') or of one littered with incorrect ones as the title of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves demonstrates. It's tough. That's why the official decision, taken in the Seventies, to undermine the teaching of grammar in state schools was such a disaster.

Even worse, a government-funded study last week found that the teaching of syntax and parts of speech should now be removed from the National Curriculum. There is, apparently, no 'evidence' that it 'improves children's writing'.

Another of my students, Carol, demonstrates just how ridiculous that idea is. She came to me in desperation after her English teacher had told her that she shouldn't be sitting her A level exam.

Apparently her prospects were so dire she was a threat to her school's position in the league tables.

Carol had spent the previous week preparing a surprise for her niece. While the child was away on holiday, her young aunt had covered her room with life-size stencils of Minnie Mouse, Tinkerbell, Snow White et al, and transformed the place into a Disney shrine. 'I think the fairies have been here,' whispered the little girl when she returned.

It was obvious that someone capable of envisioning, planning and executing a task this complex and time-consuming could also pass an A level. We set to work and I saw that my biggest challenge was to help Carol win what she called 'the fight against failure'. Having never been taught the basics of grammar and spelling, she was now being asked to comment insightfully on Shakespeare with none of the intellectual foundations she needed to do so.

It soon became clear that her teacher's grammar was pretty lousy, too.

Howling errors haphazard apostrophes, the substitution of 'too' for 'to' or 'their' for 'there' were left uncorrected in Carol's work, and the way she told Carol to handle quotations suggested that she had never read a book of English criticism in her life.

It's not often that I find myself agreeing with someone who supports the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge, but when David Blunkett laid into Charles Clarke at the end of last year, slating his record at the Department of Education, I found myself cheering from the sidelines. Not that it's all Clarke's fault. Today's children are being taught by the first generation of teachers who were themselves educated with little or no grammar instruction.

One of the great joys of English is its grammatical flexibility. You can teach someone the basics of punctuation in a couple of weeks and from then on it's a matter of experimentation and practice.

As my students began to learn how to put their points across clearly, they became interested in what they were doing. Suddenly, they were excited about their work and their marks began to soar.

Last month, the Confederation of British Industry published figures showing that since Labour came to power in 1997, more than two million have left school without basic literacy and numeracy skills. Those fortunate enough to go to independent schools or to be taught by teachers in the state system who are committed to the fundamentals of the language are able to translate their potential into the written word and later on to get the jobs that they deserve. Their peers, left in the cold embrace of the National Curriculum, face a far bleaker future.

My first pupils did their exams last summer.

When Carol got a B, I felt like I'd won the Booker Prize. And now I know what I didn't before: that the thrill of seeing someone spontaneously (and correctly) employ the semicolon is better than all the office parties in the world.

Richard Mason's latest novel, Us, is published by Viking Penguin, Pounds 12.99. To find out more about the Kay Mason Foundation visit www.kaymason foundation.org

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