March 11, 2006
We all know plenty of jokes about the proper use of grammar, such as “I are an English major” and “How to write good.”
Most of us commit heinous grammatical crimes all the time, and most do not take it too seriously.
I, for one, make countless mistakes everyday, and I hope no one is counting.
However, if we ’50-60 somethings’ do not act soon, the proper use of the English language may be lost forever.
We could be reading, in our newspapers, sentences such as this: “Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. You know what I mean, dude.”
Read all the blogs, and you will “get my drift!!!”
Whoops!
I just committed some dastardly grammatical offenses myself. For example:
You should never use the second person. Avoid clichés like the plague. All generalizations are bad. Never use the totally cool, radically groovy out-of-date slang. Excessive use of exclamation points can be disastrous!!!
(Note: the above rules of grammar were taken from an original email by someone I never heard of who was writing on a blog and gave only the name, Erion, and actually he or she was pretty good, but I have no idea who that person is or care, for that matter, and I hope that they really stop going off on tangents with some of the explanations he or she keeps giving, and actually no one is asking, so what difference does it make.”
Avoid those run-on sentences that just go on and on and on, they never stop, they just keep rambling, and you really wish the person would just shut up, but no, they just keep going and going, on and on, and their sentences just never stop, they go forever, if you know what I mean.
As I was saying, writing is a tricky matter. The problem is that our slang and everyday verbiage seep into our writing making it nearly impossible to write well.
Another dilemma presents itself here. Should I have said,” The problem is that our slang and everyday verbiage seeps into our writing,” or should I have said, “seep?”
“Take care that your verb and subject is in agreement,” Mrs. Smith said. See, I did not say that, it was my character. I am off the hook.
About the only way, a writer can escape writing foibles, in my humble opinion, is to use a lot of dialogue. Then, we can “get away with murder” just because a character speaks.
What a character says is one thing; what one writes is entirely another matter.
Sometime ago, The Washington Post “poked fun” at high school essays, listing some of the worst analogies ever written in high school dissertations. Some of these are worth repeating; however, the names of the guilty students have been removed to protect the innocent:
The best advice I have seen about writing came from Daniel Robb, a high school writing teacher. He condensed his “how-to-write well” thesis into one simple prescription. When it comes to writing, Robb explained, “One thing matters most: attention to detail.”
He cited a favorite author Edward Hoagland, American novelist and essayist, who Robb says writes “wonderfully clear prose” with great detail.
I decided to read a passage from Hoagland to see for myself:
“A log sunk on the bottom looms like a snapping turtle. The stems of the pond lilies, rising five feet, tangle one’s arms a little frighteningly—people have sometimes drowned that way—and leeches live among them, eating the bullfrogs’ eggs.”
Ah…if we could only write so well.
Since I cannot, I will stay at the task at hand, encouraging us all to remember a few important rules of grammar.
The passive voice should never be used. When dangling, watch your participles. Don’t use commas, which aren’t necessary. Don’t use no double negatives. Stamp out and eliminate redundancy. And most of all, remember the classic rule from our high school English teachers: a preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with.
