“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”
– Mark Twain
One of the things that a great many people seem to know for sure is that they don’t need any knowledge of the rules of grammar, punctuation, or syntax in order to write to a publishable standard. It is possible that I am overstating this; perhaps many of them merely know for sure that what they write is correct, or at least allowable. Whichever it is, it comes under the last part of that Twain quote: what these writers think they know for sure simply isn’t so, and it’s killing them…or at least, it’s killing their stories.
A glance through the various websites that allow writers to upload their fiction without any pre-screening requirements should be enough of a demonstration for anybody. I don’t know what some of these people are thinking. It’s obvious that they didn’t even bother to run the spelling checker before they put their stuff up for everybody to see. And I really don’t understand those writers who blast any reviewer who dares to mention the fact that they obviously don’t know what a run-on sentence is, or how to correctly punctuate dialog, or the difference between “affect” and “effect.” Are they trying to drive readers away?
But incomprehensible as this behavior is when I see it in amateur arenas, it pales beside the would-be professional writers who blithely send their un-proofread, un-reviewed, un-spell-checked work off to editors in hopes of selling it. What are they thinking? (Answer: They aren’t.) This is like going to a job interview for Ambassador to France dressed in stained and badly worn blue jeans, a muscle shirt, mismatched socks, and filthy old running shoes with the laces in knots. It doesn’t matter what your credentials are, or how well you might actually be able to do the job; you aren’t going to get in the door for the interview.
I have some sympathy for the writers who truly don’t know any better. It is very hard to improve your skill set when you don’t yet realize that it needs improving … and I’ve run into an unfortunately large number of younger writers who were never really taught grammar, punctuation, or syntax because their teachers were more concerned with encouraging them to be creative and get their stories down on paper. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging creativity, but in the long run, you still have to know the rules. At a bare minimum, you have to know that there are rules and that you don’t know what they are, or you will never realize that there are helpful things you still need to learn.
I have no sympathy at all for the prima donnas who do know their work is full of errors, but who are convinced that it doesn’t matter. “It’s fiction,” they say. “I don’t have to follow any rules.” (Wanna bet?) Or: “Oh, it’s the copyeditor’s job to fix all that.” (It isn’t.) Or “Editors are used to seeing unpolished manuscripts.” Well, yeah – editors see a lot of manuscripts full of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspelled words, and incorrect punctuation. They see them in the slush pile. And what they do with them is, they pick them up out of the slush pile and move them into the “rejections” pile as fast as they can possibly manage. It’s an obvious and easy filter: if the writer didn’t care enough about the work to clean up the grammar, spelling and punctuation, the writer probably didn’t care enough about it to do a decent job on the plot, characterization, and setting, either.
The real trouble, though, isn’t with the inevitable editorial rejection. It comes earlier than that. The real trouble with ignoring the basic rules of English is that it limits a person’s ability to write effectively.
A writer whose work is littered with sentence fragments and run-ons because he/she doesn’t really understand what a sentence is (much less what fragments and run-on sentences are) cannot make effective use of sentence fragments to increase tension or pacing or emphasis, because there are already so many fragments in his/her stuff that another one isn’t going to have any effect at all. He/she can’t use a run-on sentence to give a breathless feel to a particular character’s dialog, because run-on sentences are all over the place already, and one more isn’t going to be a change. In extreme cases, such writers aren’t even aware enough of syntax and sentence structure to get adequate variation in their sentences, resulting in prose that just plods along, regardless of whatever exciting or emotional thing is happening.
It’s the contrast from standard English that makes sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and other non-grammatical techniques work. If everything else is in standard English, dropping some unusual syntax, punctuation, or grammar into the text has an impact because of the change. The less often the writer does it, the bigger the impact. Lots of non-standard syntax, grammar, etc. means no change, no contrast, and no effect.
Those problems are a severe handicap while writing. Even if the writer (or their tame English major best friend) goes over the story later on and fixes the punctuation, grammar, and spelling, the story won’t be as effective as it could be. The writer has lost the chance to get the maximum possible impact from his/her writing, because a bunch of really basic tools are missing from his/her toolbox and some things are nearly impossible to retrofit during revisions. Besides, if the writer doesn’t know what a run-on sentences is, and that they need to avoid it most of the time unless they’re looking for a particular effect, they aren’t going to be able to get that effect any better during revision than they were during the writing phase.
Of course, if a writer doesn’t care about doing the best work, or even about doing a good job, that “writer” doesn’t have to know the basic rules of English (or whatever language they’re using) and doesn’t need to think about learning them. I don’t really understand why such people want to write, though.
I’ve always felt that if you’re going to use sentence fragments, use them to a purpose. Use them to set the mood, or a character’s frame of mine.
They are my own guilty pleasure sometimes, I must admit.
prima donna (first lady), not prima dona. Sorry. I had to do it.
Rachel – Don’t apologize; it was a goof, so thanks for telling me. I’ve fixed it.
Louise – What you said, with bells on.
Cara – OK, you have just reassured me enormously. I have a whole sequence of posts I’ve been debating about putting up just yet, because they’re kind of technical and dense…but I think they are at least useful (they are certainly interesting to work on!). So that will come next. It’ll take a while to get to the editing and specific technique part…and I trust folks will let me know if I’m getting too technical and boring for them…but I’ll start them off on Sunday.
In the meantime…it depends on what you’ve added and why. Sometimes, the most effective way to make something clear and smooth and highly readable is to make it longer; sometimes, it’s cutting. I added 10,000 words (that’s about 40 pages) to Across the Great Barrier by editorial request, and one of my friends routinely goes from a 40-50Kword first draft to 90-100K. If you’re fussed about the writing, it’s certainly worth looking at, but it might be best to slow down and take a deep breath first.
I’ve done one post on query letters; if you want another, I can do that after I’m finished with all the other stuff you asked for… 🙂
One of our tasks in my college creative writing class was to proof-read each other’s stories. I could only do about ten minutes at a time before I’d start banging my head against the wall. It *shocked* me the amount of students who didn’t know even the basic rules of English. They weren’t ignoring them, they honestly did not know that they weren’t supposed to switch tense in the middle of a sentence, or that going from first person to third in a story only works if you are switching character viewpoints, or that randomly inserting commas into a sentence does NOT make it look better.
I think it is a sad, sad pity that children are not taught grammar in elementary school anymore, before they move on to anything else. It may be considered boring, but oh, the headaches it would save, and the better writers, readers, and speakers it would produce!
As a linguist, and specifically, a syntactician, (and having worked as a grader of student papers before even starting grad school) it has really been hit home to me that written English isn’t anyone’s first language. And people don’t seem to realize that it takes just as much work to learn as a second language. You need grammar, and immersion, and incessant practice, and even after that you still haven’t learned anything about rhetoric, how to use the language effectively, or how to explain your ideas. In America, written English is the only language we expect competence in at graduation, and yet far too often we don’t even manage that.
But actually, I was wondering if you could talk a little more about the more advanced writing techniques, how to edit prose so that it actually functions the way you need it to. (I think I’m a little scared right now. I just banged my way through revision number 3 (4? I’ve lost count) and my page count has shot way up, and I’m worried the writing isn’t strong enough to support the length.) (And I was working on a query letter, but all the samples I’ve been reading are so punchy and modern. Epic YA in the vein of E. Nesbit might be a hard sell these days.)
I love the technical posts. Please share.
Thank you, thank you, for defending the art of writing. My mother is a college English instructor, and so I was raised to believe in the rules of writing. We find it so frustrating that those who profess to be experts in the field have so little regard for grammar. I have always allowed that any writing rule may be broken effectively, so long as the author is consciously making the choice to do so.
As a person who studied piano for over twelve years, I know that there are rules for proper composition that masters may break with impunity: they choose to play in different rhythms and keys, even dissonant cords, because they know how to in a way that is still musical. Yet I never hear anyone compare these musicians to babies who bang on the keys. There is an obvious difference. The same is true for the written artform: simply because an act is potentially possible does mean that all practioners of every skill level should atttempt it, and certainly not before mastering the basic structure of the art first.
Thank you for making the point about understanding the rules of grammar. As someone who works in one of the scientific/engineering fields, I’m appalled at the inability of the average engineer to write a clear, concise, grammatically correct sentence, let alone a paragraph or an entire report. I spend far too much of my time correcting the grammar and usage in the technical documentation that we have to create to do our jobs.
Yay for technical and dense! I am really looking forward to them!
(My draft went from 90k to 140k in revisions. I think there might just be too much plot. But I will try the take a deep breath before I panic plan. And then maybe locate someone with a chunk of free time to try reading it. Why are all my first readers in med school?)
My own writing has improved significantly since starting to teach English to others, especially in the myriad uses of the perfect tenses (which are quite different in English and Spanish so therefore I have to be very clear on their use in English).
That being said, I’m a horrible proofreader (I just can’t make myself care at that level of detail – I literally don’t see it), so have considered hiring a proofreader before sending stuff out.
I’ve heard it said that you are never really proficient in something until you’ve taught it to someone.
I felt the need to take Eng101 my senior year of high school, and of all the kids in my class I was the only one who could read and write with any skill (and that’s bad because I don’t know half of what I should). Part of the problem was the teacher. She was a sweet lady and didn’t want to cause any heartbreak in her students. She wasn’t going to push them to learn something because it was hard, or their home life was a mess, or something else just as lame. The other problem was the kids themselves. They weren’t going to take the time to learn something that was stuffy and boring, and that they figured they would never need.
My own writing has come a long way in the last few years (ironically after I left college), and I’ve found the more I write the better it gets. I look forward to teaching my children English, and I’m terrified that I’ll botch it. But maybe by then I’ll be good enough to actually write something.
I’m also looking forward to the technical and dense posts. I think they’re intersting.
Yes, PLEASE! to the technical posts. I love your blog because you are write so clearly and substantively about the craft of writing.
I detest when people, as you have said, think that jsut because they have a story it will automatically be good enough for any sort of recogniton (publication or otherwise). My mother is an enormous grammar buff, so I know most of this stuff and try to use it in my writing whenever I am not working towards a particular reaction. I see many examples every school day when kids misspell words, misuse punctuation, forget grammar, or all three! And it is not just in kids.
Lots of adults do this all of the time, and many don’t even realize it. I have had some teachers who were guilty of this on multiple occasions. I can feel sympathy towards kids and adults who do this simply because they were not taught it, but teaachers should know! I am looking forwards to the technical posts.
(My mother, when she was listening on the radio to the speeches on President Obama’s inauguration day, heard the Minister of Education misuse some grammar! He should know better, or is it just my wildly crazy expectation…)
@Cara
Want to enlist me as a first reader? My job is currently recording textbooks to audio files and I would LOVE to read something that isn’t all about the legal requirements of proper pesticide use. *blec*
Bonus is that I’m also the fastest reader I have ever met. (1,000+ pages is a good day) That should mean I can have my critique back in a reasonable time frame.