Icon by Peg Ihinger
A lot of things get referred to as “the tools of the writing trade.” When writers use that phrase, they’re usually talking about one of two things: either things to put words on paper or pixels (pen/pencil, paper, typewriter, computer, word processing/organizing programs, etc.), or else writing aspects (characterization, structure, viewpoint, theme, backstory, plot, etc.), techniques (foreshadowing, alliteration, cliffhangers, defamiliarization, flashbacks, metaphor, in medias res, etc.), or process tips (write every day, kill your darlings, prewrite, do morning pages, bounce ideas off others, never talk about a work-in-process, etc.).
What few writers ever say straight out is that each writer needs a personal mental “toolbox” of all of the tools—physical, mental, stylistic, processing, or whatever—that work for them and for the books they write and want to write. For some writers, process tips like “make sure you always start with a cup of that nice blackcurrant tea and a scone” are the key to having a good writing day; for others, it’s something like “always write your first draft with a fountain pen on nice paper” or “never forget to pay attention to the characters/plot/backstory (whichever the writer tends to forget most)” or “feed the cats before you sit down and start getting into it.” It’s a personal toolbox. It’s not going to be the same for everyone.
But as with any toolbox, there are a few basic tool that nearly every writer can benefit from, if they know how to use them. The problem is that they are so very basic that they almost never get talked about. Writing classes and blogs and how-to books tend to assume that everyone learned grammar, syntax, and punctuation in school, so they seldom even mention them. When they do, it’s usually about how to break them, not about what they are.
I’ve run into middle- and high-school teachers who’ve told me, in all seriousness, that they don’t want to “cripple children’s creativity” by making them learn any of the rules of grammar. This is a lot like giving someone a stack of two-by-fours and asking them to build a table, without giving them a hammer, nails, a saw, or anything else that could shape the raw material into something that looks good. There are a few table-like things you can do with a pile of uncut two-by-fours, but they won’t be as sturdy or useful as the things you can make if you have the aforementioned tools.
The raw material writers work with is our written language, and the rules of grammar, syntax, and punctuation are the tools writers use to shape it. (See my series on the Lego Theory of Writing for more detail than you probably want). Writers who think that passive voice means “any sentence that includes an auxiliary verb, especially if it’s a form of ‘to be’” are like someone who has nothing but a sledgehammer with which to cut a board down to size. Smashing the board might get rid of the unwanted extra length, but even at best, it’s not going to make a neat edge, and at worst, the board cracks down the middle and has to be discarded completely. What’s really needed is a ruler and pencil to mark the desired length, a saw to cut the board, and some sandpaper to tidy up the edge.
It’s not enough to know that rules exist. One has to know which rules apply and how to use them. Which takes knowing what the rules are, and practicing them a lot. The first time I tried to saw the end off a board, I did a terrible job. I did get the end off, but the cut was crooked. (It was good enough for the treehouse, though.) Sixty years later, I know enough to make straight cuts and maybe do a sloppy job of dovetailing two pieces of wood together (though I probably wouldn’t try; I have a pretty good notion of my limits as a carpenter).
Grammarly and other “grammar-checking” programs (including, as of this post, things like ChatGPT) do not have a sense of rhythm or voice. They’re fine for formal documents or business reports and correspondence, where the important thing is keeping house format consistent or not embarrassing yourself by making grammatical errors, but every time I’ve tried one of them (and I do that every few years, because technology keeps improving and I live in hope), every single time, I have rejected every last suggested change because they flatten out the prose, or disrupt the flow, or make the sentence virtually unreadable if you try to say it out loud (which is usually a rhythm thing again, stacking too many stressed syllables In a row).
And yes, I had a lot of the rules drilled into me in grammar school, diagramming sentences and doing drills and other things that don’t seem to be part of the current curriculum. And perhaps they shouldn’t be (though I cringe at those teacher attempting to get kids to “be creative” when part of writing creativity is about intentionally breaking rules in the right places to get a specific effect…which you can’t do if you don’t know what the rules are). But the primary thing I learned was that I had to keep on learning. There’s a reason I keep Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence, Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage on the permanent within-arms-reach shelf in my office.
As a major Anne-Shirley-like producer of complex sentences, I’ve been very grateful for my thorough elementary education in all the punctuation (incl. semicolons!) and clause types and moods, etc. But my proper appreciation definitely hit when I was older and hit a fascination for conlanging, poetry, and linguistics. Continuing to learn language is also so important because it keeps changing.
I edited an academic paper once and the author complained that I had added semicolons. He was unhappy because the academic papers he had read didn’t have semicolons. I told him that that was because most engineers, etc. don’t know how to use semicolons. It’s not that they’re wrong.
I suspect the best way to learn English grammar and syntax is to learn a foreign language – where those elements are taught – and then apply them to English by analogy.
That *shouldn’t* be the best way, but, well, here we are.
I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT with a brand-new writing project lately; I’ve found interesting things and was ready to expound them all here, and then I realized they’d make a great blog post of my own. So thank you for that, Pat! I’ve been wanting to update my blog for a while but had no ideas. 😀
The main thing I’ll summarize here from the thoughts I’ve had is that ChatGPT makes a wonderful tool, so long as you don’t try to use it for more than it’s good for (such as generating whole pieces of writing, like Internet articles or stories. It’s terrible for those.). It can give a few helpful bits and pieces of advice, but when it comes to feedback it’s mostly garbage. Where it really shone for me was when I started using it to get an idea of what a music-based magic system might look like, which it did better than any number of Google searches, which I’ve tried in the past. And even then, the suggested plot and magic system it gave me was barely coherent on the whole–but it gave me the ideas I needed to get going on my own.
My biggest take on AI is that, if I’m reading someone’s book or looking at their art, it’s because I want to see how that person views the world–not how their AI views it based on what the most popular ideas are. I read people’s books because I care about THEIR ideas and creativity, and if someone uses AI to make their product for them instead of merely to smooth out their process, then we have a problem.
I use Claude AI as a rubber duck or to do tedious work like reformatting data or filling in grids and lists. It’s a useful rubber duck, but in the sense that it helps me figure things out, not that any assumptions it makes are helpful. And sometimes it restates things I told it back to me in a way that makes a whole set of things go click.
I suspect most people wouldn’t get the rubber duck reference, so adding a link to an explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
It’s possible to absorb grammar through the gills by extensive reading.
I agree, Mary. That way grammar becomes second nature — you notice that something’s wrong with a sentence even before you figure out why.
The rules are useful when you start to figure out why. (“Oh – now I see – it sounds wrong because the verb doesn’t agree in number with the subjects three lines above.”) And I like Kevin’s point that learning another language is a great way to learn the grammar and structure of even your own language. You see the new language from the outside, you learn it systematically, where you learned your first language incrementally by using and hearing it. When I took Latin in high school, I found I learned more about English grammar than I’d absorbed in eight years of grade-school English classes.
Sometimes I need a plot skeleton and sometimes I can get by with an outline that’s a list. (Otherwise the idea peters out.)
Your tool box can vary from book to book.
A poem from Malvina Reynolds
Atonal
Some folks think all you have to do is jump around
To get a new sound.
Others believe that, if you want to avid singing sweetly,
You have to know all the rules in order to violate them completely.