From: Peter_Wilson@mindlink.bc.ca (Peter Wilson)
Subject: Re: Grammar
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 02:53:17 GMT

Crawford Kilian's experience with would-be writers is familiar to those of us
who have spent any time at all in the editing end of things.

The grammatically-challenged are everywhere and they are proud of it.

I've heard all the arguments for creativity being stifled by the wretchedly
restrictive rules of grammar.

"Let me be free," cry the downtrodden. "Let me write as I want. Only then
will I be able to make great literature. Sentence structure just gets in my
way."

And this isn't from novelists. It's from journalists (the big-time word for
reporters) who think that Tom Wolfe started out by handing in his notes and
pretending that they were actually a completed feature story.

Worse yet are the recent graduates from creative writing schools who want to
submit book reviews. Form? What's that? You want me to offer a perceptible
and consistent point of view? Why bother? People will understand what I mean.
Spelling? That's what editors like you are for. Clear, clean sentences? Look,
man, Hemingway has been dead for a long, long time. A fully-developed
argument? I just write the way I feel. The reader should have to work as hard
at this reading stuff as I do at writing it.

And so on.

In all too many cases the writers are simply being defensive. Grammar *is* a
mystery to them. They have no grounding in basic grade eight sentence
diagramming. They would be hard pressed to tell you what rule it is they are
breaking.

They are not playing with the rules for effect. They are not bending them to
force a greater understanding on the reader. They are mowing the rules down
and mangling them and leaving them dead in the street because they are the
literary equivalent of a child clinging desperately to the wheel of a
semi-trailer truck.

That said, I realize that much of what I have written above breaks the strict
rules of grade-school grammar.

I once had a very serious young man (probably pushed into it by his junior
high English teacher) write me to say that I should never begin a sentence
with "and" or "but". He went on to mention several more of my more common
infractions. He asked me, in the nicest possible way, who the hell I thought
I was screwing with the language in this manner, particularly since I was
doing it in public where everyone could watch.

I also have editors who could tell you that when it comes to certain little
rules (such as the difference between its and it's) I appear to have little
more than a nodding acquaintance with the structure of my native tongue. I
also thank the creators of Wordstar (the word processor that came bundled
with my first computer) that I discovered the spell-check utility before the
dictionary police came to take me away forever.

I guess what I'm saying is that what all writers have to do is to kick the
arrogance habit. A lot of the time we *don't* know what we're doing and we
*do* need heavy editing.

And (uh, oh, there's that word staring a sentence again) we need to try to
remember as much as we possibly can about those grammar rules, especially
before we pretend to ourselves that they're just getting in our way.

Peter Wilson