A Different Approach to Teaching Grammar

Grammar. It is a word that can strike fear into English students everywhere. From first grade all the way until we graduate we are learning, memorizing, reciting, deciphering, forgetting, guessing about the rules of grammar. Our teachers teach it until about high school. After that I guess students are supposed to be experts on split infinitives and absolute phrases (which still plague me). When high school students write papers, struggling to make sure the content is just right, it can be disconcerting to receive your paper back, full of angry red marks because your grammar wasn't perfect. I would like to take a different approach.
This is not to say I condone abandoning the teaching of grammar. That is certainly not the case. We need a universal way to communicate clearly with each other. But the fact is, people speak differently. Different races, ethnicities, regionalities, genders, age groups, etc. have different ways of communicating. As long as they are able to get their ideas through in a way that can be understood, they are communicating effectively. If we all stuck to the same arbitrary set of rules language would be quite boring.
I would like to try to impress upon my students that it is OK to speak differently, and to write differently as well. I think the key is audience awareness. I want to teach my students to write to their audience. You are going to construct a paper much more differently if you are writing a brief for your boss as opposed to writing a letter to a friend. You just have to learn to recognize the difference.
In the classroom, I would like to try to have students engage in different types of writing to different groups of people. How would you write an e-mail to your best friend? How would you write a letter to your mom? How would you write down a recipe? How would you write a technical report? Understanding your audience is paramount to effective communication, which leads to good writing.
As we think about some of the most popular works in history, many come to mind that intentionally don't follow the standard rules of grammar. These works drew attention because of the syntax and the author very deliberately used a certain style. This can be an effective writing technique and you don't want to take that away from students. I know when I was in school our teacher constantly warned us against fragments. You would think her job hinged on us not using a fragment in her classroom and if one of us were to utter one, she would immediately be escorted off the premises of the school, unemployed and a failure. It took a REALLY long time, but shockingly no therapy, or me to realize fragments can be effective if used correctly. Though my hand still shakes a little every time I write one (thanks Mrs. Green), I find they can be very good for making a point in a creative way.
As my students and I tackle the mysterious art that is grammar, I hope I can make it a little less daunting for them. I don't want them to change the way they speak and write, I want them to learn to speak and write in a way that is most appropriate for a certain situation. Students should not not be afraid of writing because of grammar and I will do my best to be sure that doesn't happen. End of story! (A fragment by the way)