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| Learning Grammar |
| Unless you have an expert secretary always at your disposal or an infinitely patient friend who proofreads well you will probably want to learn grammar. It will not remove the need for proofreaders altogether since it's so hard to find your own mistakes. But you don't have to feel so dependent since their task will be minimal. Don't make an all-out assault on learning grammar unless you are already very secure in your writing; or unless you have decided for some reason to take a rest from' working on your writing. Or unless you are so bothered by your problems in grammar that you can't stop yourself from thinking about them all the while you write, no matter how hard you try to concentrate on your meaning. But to learn grammar you don't have to make an all-out assault. Lou Kelley suggests a useful way to learn grammar slowly in a fashion that will not be too distracting. It is, in effect, a way to sneak up on grammar. I have slightly simplified her procedure as follows: Each time you revise a piece of writing and get help in removing mistakes, pick a few of those mistakes that were most troublesome -- especially ones you repeated. Just pick four or five. Don't try to learn everything at once. For those few errors, try to understand why you made them and what the rule is for getting them right. Your handbook should help you with the rule. Perhaps it is a misspelling that results from the way you tend to hear and pronounce the word. Perhaps it's a grammatical usage that's all right in talking, but not for correct writing (such as "ok" or "everyone got their reward"). Perhaps it is a mistake in punctuation, such as with commas, where there's not a clear rule and you simply need to feel what's right. Record these mistakes in a notebook or file, along with the correction, your theory of why you make this mistake, and your best understanding of the rule. When you next correct a piece of writing, pull out your file or notebook and refresh your memory on the mistakes you are likely to make. This will help you to find them as you correct. But as this list of errors grows, don't look at more than the most recent ten or fifteen. You can't hope to remember everything. You are simply trying for a list of recent and correctable mistakes so your mind can be chewing them over -- both consciously and unconsciously. You can even throw away old pages after a while since you're not trying for some huge complete catalogue of errors. Your handbook provides that. Your file or notebook should be like a muddy pond with water coming in one end and spilling out at the other-but getting clearer and clearer over the months and years. |
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