There’s been a lot of talk between John, me, and you, Dear Readers, about how sick we’ve all grown of the endless lists and trite advice offered by writing blogs.
Wild tangent time.
I was reading an article on Cracked.com (the only place where lists are awesome) a couple of weeks ago, 7 Commonly Corrected Grammar Errors That Aren’t Mistakes. I read everything on Cracked.com, and if you don’t, you should feel bad for your wasted life. Anyways, Bucholz, the columnist who wrote this, takes a brief aside to talk about the war between Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammarians. I thought about that and said, “Huh. That sounds like the kickoff to my next entry on Scribble Splatter.”
Or rather, when I was getting coffee the morning after I read that post, I said that. Then I reminded myself what “that” was in my sentence, because the antecedent was unclear. Then, 16 days later, I wrote this. You’re reading it now. Hurray, efficiency!
Brief background if Cracked.com articles are TL;DR (shame on you). Prescriptive Grammarians make lists and bitch when people don’t follow the rules. Descriptive Grammarians understand that the lists exist, but also accept that language is alive and you can’t nail it to the wall without killing it. You see where I’m going with this?
No?
Not even with my Article Title? And the bread crumbs I left?
Okay.
If you want to write great writing, find great examples, instead of a checklist. Writing isn’t engineering. It isn’t a launch date checklist. It’s harder to nail down.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to nail down. I absolutely do believe that you can teach writing.
But you can’t teach it with lists. You can’t teach it with childish adherence to a set of formulae (unless you want childish, immature writing). Or maybe you can, what do I know? (Not an Expert)
What I’m saying is that instead of going to the lists, generated by people who love lists from some arbitrary data set, do yourself the favor of looking at the data.
What I’m saying is read. Read critically. Read each sentence carefully. Do that for the whole essay (if you’re an essayist). The whole comedy article (if you’re a comedy writer). The whole 800-page science fiction epic (ouch). Think critically the whole time. Did that sentence work for you? That paragraph? That chapter? That novel? What didn’t work? Why? How would you have improved it? Maybe I can’t write a better Dresden novel than Jim Butcher, but I’d certainly write Dresden differently. Not because Jim Butcher is a bad writer. I love reading his novels. But our voices are different and my execution choices will be different. I’ll focus on different things. When you’re reading critically, those things you’d change? That’s you.
And now that you know who you are: Write. You can’t get in shape from watching other people’s workouts.
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Gregory Blake is a freelance fiction, comedy, and opinion writer. You can find him on Facebook, Twitter, and on his blog.
jowidy
Greg
“But our voices are different and my execution choices will be different. I’ll focus on different things. When you’re reading critically, those things you’d change? That’s you.”
Amen! My philosophy has always been that you can bend the rules of grammar IF you know what the rules are first. You read anything by Ray Bradbury and you’ll see all sorts of run on sentences and the like. As long as you know when to effectively use a run-on sentence and when not to, it’s okay. Same with some of the other rules (using semi-colons, adverbs, etc). Just because you don’t write like someone else doesn’t mean their writing is inherently better or worse. Voice is the most important thing an author has to work with.
I think it all depends on the amount of reason the author is pumping into ones work. It’s really not hard to see if someone broke the rules of grammar to make a piece more outstanding or simply because they didn’t know any better.
Grammar Nazi’s?
To a degree I sympathize with them, afterall there is no better way to tell if someone is worth reading or not than to catch them making obvious errors on the first page. But as someone who likes starting sentences with conjunctions and would rather put a comma instead of a semicolon before ‘afterall’ in the last sentence – God I hate their guts. I love them about as much as Indiana Jones loved actual Nazi’s in the movies. So long as the reader understands what the words on the page are trying to say and finds them agreeable – grammar should stay the hell out of the way.
Correct grammar does stay the hell out of the way. Sloppy grammar annoys the reader because it throws him out of the story as he struggles to understand what you’re saying. Grammar is hard for me, but I don’t blow it off and attribute my shoddy work to artistry or evolving language.
(BTW, there’s no apostrophe in the plural of Nazi.)
I like your blog. I also hate writing about writing, but I feel obligated to try. :)TX
I agree. Correct grammar does stay out of the way. Incorrect grammar gets in the way. I just don’t believe that correct grammar resides in any list. I think that a gut-check of “This didn’t work for me” is more useful to me as a writer than “You wrote in the passive voice and that is WRONG because a list says so!”
In my opinion, good writing is clear, not muddled, if it’s fiction, essay, whatever. Attributing a reader’s incomprehension to how artfully it’s stated is a cop-out (I think I say as much in Perissologia).
But language does evolve, something the lists don’t necessarily accommodate. Does a hanging participle muddy the intended meaning of a phrase? Is a split infinitive worth rejecting a novelist’s manuscript over? I’d say not.
What do you think? :)
Yes to the hanging participle–that can muddy meaning. No to the split infinitive. That’s a precious style issue. In fact, the rule against split infinitives is passé. Nobody rejects a manuscript over one split infinitive, though a disappointed writer may convince himself of it. :)TX