![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
Your grammar, it sucks like the black hole on a cloudy day. If you do not become the grammar master, you may loose your readers who will not be coming back.
(Oh, how it hurts to type that.)
Grammar is not just the green squiggly line under most of your sentences in MS Word. Nor is it something your septuagenarian English teacher invented because your stories were just so edgy, so radical, he had to fail you.
Words are not distributed randomly in sentences. If you want to be understood by your readers, you place words in a certain order, based on common rules. In case you’ve forgotten, we call these rules grammar.
(This casual definition is worded specifically to fibrillate the hearts of the Grammar Nazis, who trawl the Internet looking for dangling participles and plural noun confusion, and who secretly hope that I am one of them. Fsck you, Nazis! It must be so hard to clean that glass house in which you live.)
Unless you’re over 40, you may not know what I’m talking about, because public schools stopped teaching grammar sometime around 1970. Now, even the teachers don’t understand it.
This is both the problem, and part of the solution. If you don’t know what an infinitive is, let alone how to stop splitting them, you can be sure that 99% of modern readers couldn’t care less. The world has moved on from the expectation of syntactic exactitude - now you’re considered “bright” if you can read a newspaper after 12 years of schooling. What matters is whether readers can interpret meaning from your sentences.
If your grammar is terrible, which is extremely likely, readers will have a difficult time trying to work out what the fsck you’re on about. On the other hand, if your writing is grammatically perfect, you may pass the “old fogey” test but most readers will find your writing stiff and boring, and many will find it just as difficult to read.
A common understanding of grammar is the primary method by which you communicate your ideas to the reader. (I say “primary” because your writing is still full of dull, lazy cliches which communicate old ideas to the reader who already understands them, but that’s another Reason entirely.) If you don’t have this common understanding of how readers turn each sentence into something approximating what you meant, your work is going into the bin before the end of page 1.
Sure, you can learn the rules of grammar, just as you can learn to say “How much for the private dance with the happy ending” in another language. There are some fine books on the (former) topic. But unless you already have a good understanding, you’ll never pass for a local, and you’ll always wind up overpaying.
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An intricate dance we dance whenever we write anything considered worth reading. The percentage of stilted, unreadable slop that permeates the internet tends to put me into a intense rage, but then again I’ve always fought the Grammar Nazis whenever I’ve had the chance. If you have to think about it for more time than you think about whatever you happen to be writing about though, then…well you know the deal…stop writing.
My grammar and your grammar
Sitting by the fire
My grammar says to your grammar
“I’m gonna set your book on fire!”
I know not of what you speak. “Grammer Flammer!” says I.
Great post today. The other day I was in the classroom with my daughter’s first grade teacher. She was looking for a book that she was going to loan me. She turns to me and says, “Well, I borrowed that book to someone and they must not have returned it.”
*AEeeeeee, thunk*
Yes, that was the sound I made as I hit the ground.
rashenbo is too modest to link to the poem she wrote in response to this post.
writer on board, I’m never going to hear that song the same way ever again. (Come to think of it, for all I know that’s the original lyric.)
rashenbo and writer on board would both score big points for their efforts, except that inspiring poetry is the exact fsckin’ opposite of what I’m trying to do here!
Next thing you know, some joker’s going to dedicate a novel to me, and I’ll have to delete the whole blog.
Sean, even if you’re getting poetry written about your work, it still emphasizes the need for your services. The only poetry that should be written about the writing process reads “Here I sit, broken-hearted, tried to write but only farted.”
Well, as my mother would say: don’t like the grammar of my second language? You should try the grammar of my third.
Not to be snarky, but I think you mean “lose” and not “loose” in that second sentence there…
Also, I don’t think grammatically perfect writing is inherently boring and stiff. There’s something to be said for beautiful, complex, old-fogey sentence construction. Craft, and all that.
Stacy,
Your irony filter is set a fraction too low.
Stacy said…
Not to be snarky, but I think you mean “lose” and not “loose” in that second sentence there…
Could it POSSIBLY be written that way to make a point about grammar and spelling?
As a confirmed grammar Nazi, I say that anyone who can’t use a comma properly belongs in a mass grave.
In reality, misused commas are the fastest way to get a rejection from me.
Spencer, how do you get confirmed as a Grammar Nazi? Are there badges?
Well, that and you have to rat out a friend who may be hiding a dangling participle.
Actually, they stopped teaching grammar after the ’80s. Every year, from seventh grade to graduation, we had to diagram sentences for weeks, take tests on parts of speech, and recite prepositions (aboard, about, above…). We were given extra credit if we could correctly diagram the Preamble to the Constitution. My children, however, have trouble identifying anything other than nouns and verbs. I’m passing this post along to both of them because it backs up what I keep telling them about being writers when they grow up.