Nassau Community College (NCC) offers a grammar course as a humanities option that may be taken instead of a literature course. The approach to the course incorporates reader-response theory, feminist criticism, new historicism, and journal writing as the key means for enabling students to learn. Each student has a notebook divided into sections representing different areas of grammar. The first section focuses on grammar as presented by the course text, called "grammar a" for "acceptable." Students formulate grammar rules by providing a sentence which illustrates the rules they have uncovered in their text. The second section is for grammar as presented in literary texts. Students are asked to describe how they feel about the literary works they read on one side of the page, while summarizing the pieces and analyzing their grammar on the other side. Students quickly realize that some very good writers do not follow all of the rules of "grammar a." The third section is for student's own grammar, called "grammar p" for "personal." For this section, students create their own texts through free-writing, and analyze the extent to which they have followed or not followed specific rules of grammar. The fourth section is devoted to grammar found in the everyday world. For this section, "MS. Magazine" serves as the principal text, but students also copy sentences they hear on the street into their notebooks and study the use of grammar in newspapers. Examples of everyday grammar are compared with examples showing grammar rules from the textbook. The fifth part of the journal is used to record due dates. The course emphasizes the historical and sociological bases of grammar. Students are graded on the basis of their journal and how well it reflects their awareness of grammar choices. (JMC)