grammar

Spell-Check is Your Friend. Seriously.

Long before I ever thought I was creative enough to write any kind of fiction, my relationship with the written word held a particular distinction. I was English Student of the Year in 9th grade. That was the year of sentence diagramming (among other things).

Let me tell you, I diagrammed sentences like nobody’s business. I don’t remember a lot of the specifics now, but it did give me a pretty solid hold on some tricky grammar, comma rules, and the like.

That was me and English for a long time. The Technician. I wrote perfect essays that were exactly what my history teacher wanted to see. I wrote killer research papers and aced my technical writing class in college.

These skills still come in handy now. Just ask Mindy McGinnis, whose comma splices I’ve helped hide from her editor.

In the effort to develop my inner novelist, though, I try not to dwell on those technical aspects. I even make a conscious effort sometimes to let them go, allow myself to make “mistakes” for the purpose of flow and voice. (This was easier once my linguistics professor taught me the difference between Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar.)

That aspect of my journey has helped me ease up on the “Fix It!” button every time I see a grammar or spelling error. (Okay, the reaction’s still there. But not as violent as it used to be.) I’m sure other novelists are very in-the-creative-moment, especially when drafting, and leave those things to be cleaned up in editing/revising. To stay in that creative zone, they may even turn off the spell-as-you-go feature that pops up with those red/orange underlines when you misspell something.

Awesome. Whatever works for the individual writer.

But some seem to forget that we do need to run a spell-check eventually.

I know, spell-check isn’t perfect. It’s annoying when it dings every one of your proper names, or made-up words for another language, or even perfectly spelled calculus vocabulary. And it won’t catch misspellings that happen to be proper spellings of other words. It won’t save you on a “phase-vs-faze” debate.

I’ve heard some say they don’t worry about such things, because that’s what editors are for. Sure, editors should be able to catch the errors so subtle, your eye glides over them. But leaving flat-out wrongly spelled words that five minutes with spell-check could catch?

That makes it look like we don’t care. It doesn’t look professional. It doesn’t look like we respect the agent/editor/other human being we’re sending our work to.

So, my plea for the week. Save someone a headache. Show them you care.

Run a spell-check. 🙂

Speak up:

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Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Grammar

These are terms I learned in a linguistics class in grad school. If you’re not familiar, here are the quick-and-dirty definitions.

Prescriptive grammar is grammar according to the super-official grammar books.

Descriptive grammar is how people actually talk.

Of course, language is always evolving, and often the changes come because something in the realm of descriptive grammar becomes so common and pervasive, it overwrites the prior rule in the prescriptive grammar books.

In certain arenas, it’s appropriate to follow prescriptive grammar rules to the letter. When writing fiction, it’s not so clear-cut. There’s also voice to consider. Dialogue in particular gets a little more leeway when it comes to grammar.

Once in a while, though, something comes along that can’t be explained away by voice, and yet I can’t bring myself to write it the “proper” way because my gut says we’re on the verge of overwriting the rule. (Or at the least, my gut says people who talk that way in real life are a critically endangered species.)

For example, in my current project, I have a character say, “It is her.” (The sense is, “She is the one we’re looking for.”)

Gerty Grammarian says it should be, “It is she.” In the particular situation, it makes sense that the character would be fairly educated and would probably speak in a proper manner.

But I can’t bring myself to write it that way. It just feels too wrong.

In a situation later in the story, a similar line came up, and in that case I did change it. I wanted that particular character to be over-the-top formal, so it made sense to me. It felt right.

How about you? Do you have any little gems of grammar that you know are “correct” one way, but you just can’t bring yourself to write it that way?

Speak up:

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Gung-Ho About Grammar

If I’ve ever critiqued or beta-read for you, you probably noticed that I can get nit-picky with grammar when I want to. For me, it’s just part of my OCD, perfectionist nature. I see an error, and it’s like being jacked into an electric fence unless I do something to fix it.

Okay, maybe not that bad. But I used to be almost that bad. When we did diagramming sentences in ninth grade, I didn’t understand why so many of my classmates were complaining. For the most part, it was easy, I thought. What’s the big deal? My brain just seemed to be wired for it.

(Before anyone starts sending me hate-mail, realize that at the time I also thought creative writing was a kind of magic I would never possess. So, you know, some things balance out.)

When I started teaching deaf students, I really began to understand just how wacky English grammar is. No wonder even those of us who hear and speak the language every day screw it up! My students will master one rule only to discover there are twenty more exceptions they have to figure out.

Even with my super-grammar-skillz, there are a few things that still hang me up. I only just got a solid handle on the whole lay-vs-lie thing. (Related concepts, and the past tense of one is the present tense of the other? Whose idea was that?)

Further-vs-farther? I know the rule. Farther is for distance; further is for degree. But I swear I’ve come across a few places where I could argue it fits either condition. (And of course, I can’t come up with an example right now. If I ever do, I’ll throw it in an edit or the comments.)

“If it were” vs “If it was”? I remember being told if it actually happened that way it was one, but if the circumstance was never true, it’s the other … something like that. I have a really hard time wrapping my head around that one and all related forms, so if you have several super-clear illustrations to pass along, I’d be hugely grateful.

The nice thing is, grammar isn’t so hard to learn. (Particularly compared to some other aspects of writing. I can’t begin to tell you how to develop more voice in your manuscript, but I can help you understand the proper way to use semicolons.)

What about you? Any particular nuances of grammar that you just can’t nail? Any that you KNOW, but find you have to keep a close eye on yourself not to slip?

Speak up:

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