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| Getting Rid of Mistakes in Grammar |
| I suppose I shouldn't talk about "getting rid of mistakes in grammar" because I'm not just talking about grammar strictly defined but also about punctuation, spelling, and mechanics; and because these things are really conventions of usage rather than matters of absolute correctness or error. Whether a given usage is a "mistake" or not often depends on the audience and the situation. But I would rather talk crudely about grammar and right and wrong since that is the way most of us experience this whole business and that is the way we are going to have to come to terms with it. Like it or not, there is a deep psychic importance to that whole set of rules and conventions for writing which we tend to sum up loosely as grammar. Grammar is glamour. They are the same word. Like channel/canal or guard/ward or porridge/pottage, the two words just started out as two pronunciations of the same word -- a mere matter of regional accent. For grammar was glamour. If you knew grammar you were special. You had prestige, power, access to magic; you understood a mystery; you were like a nuclear physicist. But now, with respect to grammar, you are only special if you lack it. Writing without errors doesn't make you anything, but writing with errors -- if you give it to other people -makes you a hick, a boob, a bumpkin. Grammar school used to be a special gateway into privilege for a select few. Now grammar school is the lowest, simplest, least special school there is. The result, oddly enough, is that now grammar often preoccupies people more than when it was glamour. People who don't know grammar are liable to think about it all the time when they are writing. They have only to pick up a pencil and their attention is almost entirely occupied with the question of whether things are right or wrong. They are even liable to feel nervous when they speak -- at least if they are speaking to strangers. In addition, lots of people who do know grammar well cannot see a mistake in their reading without being completely distracted from the meaning of the words. And it's not just people who know grammar well: everyone gets distracted. The only thing that's different about people who know grammar well is that they find more mistakes. (English teachers may be hawk-eyed about mistakes, but actually they are better than most people at paying attention to the meaning of words while still noticing mistakes in grammar.) Grammar is writing's surface. When you meet strangers, you can hardly keep from noticing their clothing before you notice their personality. The only way to keep someone from noticing a surface is to make it "disappear," as when someone wears the clothes you most expect her to wear. The only way to make grammar disappear -- to keep the surface of your writing from distracting readers away from your message -- is to make it right. So what follows from this peculiar power of grammar to monopolize people's attention? from the nasty fact that grammar, like sex and money, can only be ignored when it's fine? Perhaps the most obvious thing that follows is the desirability of learning grammar if you don't know it. (Not the theory of grammar, though that is an interesting subject, but how to write right.) Learning grammar well would free some people from a gnawing if sometimes unconscious insecurity and enable them to hold their heads up in some arenas where they now feel they can't. Happily, it's not hard to find good instruction in grammar. There are lots of courses for people of all ages and lots of good programmed textbooks from which you can learn it by yourself in six months of diligent slogging. For many people, a class brings up intolerable feelings of "Oh, I don't know grammar, I'm an idiot." But a class is probably the best method for ensuring that you keep going. If you take a class, try to shop around to see if you can find a teacher who suits you. But you can't learn grammar overnight. If you want your words to be taken seriously you have to find some other way to remove the mistakes from your final draft. Mistakes in grammar lead readers to notice other weaknesses. And most readers cannot keep from assuming, even if unconsciously, that you are stupid if they find mistakes in your grammar. If you weren't brought up to speak and write standard, middle-class, white English, you'll probably be twice penalized for any mistakes in standard written English you make-and not just with white middle-class readers either. Removing errors may well be the most "cost effective" of all revising activities. You can learn lots of grammar in six months, but it would take two or three times that long to learn everything you need. I, for example, even though I have a pretty good knowledge of grammar, cannot remove enough errors from my final draft to make readers take me as seriously as I want to be taken. I get a friend or two to help me by proofreading. You can't see your own mistakes. Learning grammar is a formidable task that takes crucial energy away from working on your writing, and worse yet, the process of learning grammar interferes with writing: it heightens your preoccupation with mistakes as you write out each word and phrase, and makes it almost impossible to achieve that undistracted attention to your thoughts and experiences as you write that is so crucial for strong writing (and sanity). For most people, nothing helps their writing so much as learning to ignore grammar as they write. |
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