Brave Writer

Lie or lay?

Prisca and me, or Prisca and I?

Bless our heart, or bless our hearts?

Do these kinds of questions drive you crazy? You’re not alone. Lots of picky people care about proper grammar, so much so they correct you when you speak and smile smugly at their proper erudition.

But I’m not one of them.

The rote study of grammar is one of those subject areas I’ve avoided most of my life. I’ve studied five languages, spoke French well enough to study at a French university and learned Arabic well enough to live in Morocco. I worked as a senior editor for a magazine, ghostwrote a number of short books and was a contributing editor to another magazine.

With all of these opportunities to make grammatical mistakes, you’d think that I’d be an expert, ready to throw down technical vocabulary like participles and subordinate clauses with the best of ‘em. You’d think I’d love grammar and would be as enthusiastic to promote it as the next English teacher.

Nope.

The technical side of grammar isn’t what draws me to writing or learning languages. As a native speaker, my grasp of grammar is largely intuitive. I speak according to my ear, not according to a prescribed set of rules. When in doubt, I consult grammar reference books. I’ve learned a lot about habits in grammar from grammar check in Word, for example (which is not always accurate so I’m provoked to reevaluate the grammatical choice and see if I agree).

What has happened for me over time, though, is that because of learning to speak foreign languages, I’ve been introduced to the structure of language and find that I can address my questions to grammar reference books without getting completely lost. I’ve absorbed how verb tenses work, what a clause is, how adverbs and adjectives modify nouns and verbs, what an article does and more.

I learned how to avoid ending sentences with prepositions in English by learning how to do it in French, for instance.

My kids, who have been raised with my lacksidaisical approach to grammar, have shown an interesting development as they encounter foreign languages. The older two (19 and 16) were raised with dictation and copywork. We did three years of grammar total. They tell me today that they don’t think they really grasped the nuances of grammar until they studied Klingon (older one) and French (younger one). My next child (14) is studying Spanish. He and I did some grammar together in English, but it wasn’t until he started working on Spanish that he retained any of it. Suddenly he is saying, “Oh, I see how the verb thing works.”

I studied biblical Greek with Noah last fall. Some of the students in our college class lamented the fact that they had not paid attention in English grammar class because they needed a grasp of grammar for Greek. But Noah and I chuckled. We knew that the way we had learned grammar was through foreign language itself. These students would learn what they needed to know in Greek. That’s when they’d get it for English.

So if you find that the study of grammar is a tedious chore in your household, that no one seems to retain it, I do have a recommendation for you. Learn a foreign language. Find someone to teach you and your kids.

You’ll get an appreciation for English grammar thrown into the bargain.

(Just as an aside - my oldest son, Noah, who did not like Winston grammar or dictation is about to enter the linguistics program at University of Cincinnati. He can’t get enough of grammar now. :))

A friend sent me these in email and they made me laugh so much I had to share them.

Analogies and metaphors supposedly found in high school essays:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

26. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

27. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

28. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

This idea comes from Christine. She’s got boys who are crazy about football. You might try something similar with any interest your child has. Find the appropriate literature (video game reviews, ballet magazine, quilting manual, cookbook). Thanks Christine!

Yesterday I took out the real sports page and asked my boys to each pick an article. My younger boy picked some of the smaller recap articles. I had them circle the verbs that they found. Then I asked them how many times “to be” verbs were used (almost never). They were all action words. Then we looked at the words like “upend.” How is that better than “beat”? We talked about the word pictures that the verbs evoked. What picture did they get in their head from “edged” or “squashed,” and so on. They enjoyed it. We may do the same thing with adjectives another week or use of quotations. Just thought I would share our fun grammar.

Lots of you have asked me, “What about grammar?”

Great question. I may be the wrong person to answer it.

You see, I did not major in English. I got my degree in history, and I’m getting my Master’s in theology. I’ve studied four other languages and have learned to speak well in two of them. But as far as sentence diagramming? Well, I hardly remember that unit in my honor’s English class… like all good public schooled kids. (Why crowd your brain with sentence diagrams when there were BOYS to flirt with?)

But this scant knowledge of grammar (as in, knowing the names for all the parts of speech, understanding sentence constructions, etc.) did not stop me from being a ghostwriter or an editor. In fact, I was the senior editor over a period of three years for one publication and the managing editor for two books projects that involved major revisions of the submitted content since the contributors were not writers.

How could businesses trust me with these publications if I didn’t have “training” in grammar, punctuation and proper syntax?

Answer:
I am a competent native speaker who reads and writes a lot.

Most of us already have a strong grasp of English grammar. Native speakers of any language know if a sentence is correctly formed by how it sounds. That is the first level of grammar—being able to form sentences that sound right to other native speakers. And just about all of us do that.

Certainly there are regional slip-ups. In my region, there are people who say, “She don’t have to go to the store right now because she don’t have a car.” And that sounds right to people from around here.

But by and large, if a person reads and writes, speaks and listens, a native speaker will learn 90% of the grammar patterns that he or she needs to function successfully as both a writer and speaker.

So what about that niggly ten percent? Should we work on grammar and punctuation every single year of school, cycling through the same terms and constructions, beating terms into hormonally resistant brains, when native speakers don’t really grasp the meaning of “adverbial clauses,” but use them successfully whenever they chat for sixteen hours on the phone, never taking a single breath, feet flopped over the sides of the “good chairs” in the living room, reminding me when I get a call that they are “on the other line. Can you make it short, please?” (Yes, we need a second line in our teenager-dominated house…)

I say “Stop the madness!” (And give me the phone…)

I have a few tips for how to handle that ten percent of grammar we misuse:

• Read.
  Read widely. Read fiction and non-fiction. Read newspaper articles, online reviews of movies and music, blogs, magazines, Shakespeare’s sonnets, poetry, field guides, flyers from the supermarket, classics and contemporary authors. Read it all.
  The special skill of line editing is working with words. A mastery of good syntax—how words are strung together well—can come in only two ways: by spending the first twenty-five years of one’s life in a drawing room with E. B. White, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bowen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, John Fowles, Langston Hughes, Joyce Carol Oates, James Baldwin and John Updike—or by reading their works and those of other writers whose choice of words and word arrangement establishes our standards of literate communication.
  (The Elements of Editing Plotnik)
• Copy
  Copy good writing. Copy favorite passages. Copy poems.

• Watch TV
  I’m serious. Actors who speak English express it in the most sophisticated and nuanced use you will hear. Their writers design the scripts to cause you to laugh, feel suspense, to engage with the story. The actors take the written words and bring them to life correctly. It is rare that you hear a glaring misuse of English in a sit-com. If you do, it is because it is a part of the character’s personality or regional weakness which is often obvious to everyone on the show.

  Movies and books on tape also fill a similar function.

  Listen to radio countdowns and talk radio shows. Go to live performances (plays).

  Get around masterful native speakers any time you can.

• Dictation
  For written skills, I still think dictation is the way to grow. Kids are learning usage in context and are gently challenging themselves at a higher and higher level as they age and select harder material.

• Foreign language instructions
  Learning another language does more to teach the content of grammar (what it is, why it works, how it works) than studying English grammar. Can you think why? It’s because you can’t rely on your ear to guide you. You are required to learn the rules in order to learn another language. Suddenly prepositional phrases matter. Knowing whether the adjective comes before the noun or after is really important, and relevant.

• Use grammar references for the rest
  Seriously. We all do. Editors have more grammar references than anyone. Whenever I am confused or uncertain, I pop open Nitty Gritty Grammar or Woe is I and double check. Grammar check on the computer is marvelous for at least making you rethink your choice. Sometimes grammar check is wrong… and you know how you know? It sounds wrong to you. That’s how it works.

I’ll deal with grammar testing in another post since this is getting long. Feel free to discuss it further here. There is one thread already discussing grammar and kids in the Scratch Pad, the public Brave Writer forum.

–julie