Grammar is important

[kengr]

As a writer, and even as a reader, some of those things you were taught back in English classes, oh so long ago, are important.

As an example, diagramming sentences. Now, most of us weren't fond of this. And I'm amazed that I retain as much as I do. But being able to break a sentence, especially a long complex one, down into its component parts and see how those parts relate can bail you out of a lot of trouble.

I could go looking for references on how you do it "properly", but let's just go with what works.

At heart, as sentence, any sentence, breaks down into three parts. Subject, object and verb. A sentence describes an action (or if you write the way I do, several actions and a lot of modifiers :-)

Subject is who or what is acting. Object is who or what is getting acted upon. And the verb tells you what the action is.

Sometimes the subject or object is implied. "Pick up that trash" has an implied subject of the person being talked to. "The hammer struck" has an object implied (we hope) by context.

Now, of course, in all but the simplest sentences, there are modifiers (adjectives, adverbs, etc) to one or more of the subject, object and verb. Then you get to add in various clauses and the like. Messy, but with some thought, you can figure out where the modifiers attach. That is, what word or phrase they modify.

As a writer, this skill is needed to check out things when things are getting messy. Or when someone complains that something is confusing.

Sometimes, you'll discover that what you wrote is capable of being read more than one way (ie it is plausible to assign modifiers or even pronouns to more than one place/person. In which case you have to de-ambiguate things. This sometimes means making something a tiny bit clunkier. And sometimes it requires rewriting an entire sentence of paragraph.

I'm not sure which is worse. Having these "oops" moment pointed out, or re-reading something after the heat of creation is past and having to puzzle out what you meant. Neither is fun.

And that brings us to why these skills are important for *readers*.

Sometimes, especially with fanfic, but all too often with professionally published works, you'll hit something where you have to sit down and "diagram" the text just to figure out what the author *probably* intended.

So being able to parse a sentence *consciously* instead of the normal "run on autopilot" is a skill that should be maintained. Or developed if you didn't get it from English class (or forgot it from disuse)

If you proof read for folks or beta read, you *will* need this at some point. And as a writer, it helps. If only to get yourself out of corners you've written yourself into. (trust me, been there, done that)

Comments

[seawasp]

Oh, I can do that, but not by diagramming on paper; paper diagrams make MEGO. I just look at it and see what someone's talking about. it was obvious once people started talking about that section why they were confused; the only part I argued about was saying there was more than one PoV, when there isn't. There's only one PoV in any of those sections; if you think there's more than one, either I wrote something confusingly, or you misread. :)

[kengr]

Oh, *we* always know what we meant in a section. Which is why it's a shock when someone asks what we meant or reads it differently.

And yeah, I rarely do the "on paper" bit anymore. But in my head I still picture modifiers hanging off of the words they modify and clauses hanging from other bits.

The "I know what I mean" bit bites us in other ways too. The classic "missing word(s) for example.

One guy on a mailing list was having trouble scaring up a proofreader, and I pointed him at the built in "read a file out loud" utilities in recent versions of Windows and OS X.

It's slow, but it will find things you've missed. Alas, unlike screen readers for the blind, you can't speed up the file readers. (I'm amazed that I can understand Lin's at full speed.)

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Where I often run into trouble, reading, is figuring out which line of dialog belongs to which characters, when there aren't enough "he said" and "she said" tags.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

The less context provided in speech or writing, the greater the necessity of clarity. Brief online posts are especially bad at not providing context. People who are misunderstood because they ignore - or even deliberately flout - the rules which help with clarity have no-one to blame but themselves.

I am continually baffled by people who ignore the rules of grammar and punctuation in their writing, then get mad when people don't understand them. I once saw someone on an e-mail list deny that their random placement of commas was the reason people kept getting their position wrong. They accused others of not reading their posts clearly and, besides "English is an evolving language."

Yeah. That's why we can't read Shakespeare any more. (To clarify, once you learn the unfamiliar vocabulary, the rules of grammar and punctuation used in his works are close enough to ours that understanding them isn't all that difficult. Though learning the context for some unfamiliar situations can't hurt. ;-)

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

English is an evolving language. That means when individual writings get torn apart by wolves, it improves the species as a whole.

[kengr]

Trust me, after reading some would-be-writers "works", I am tempted to let the wolves tear apart the *writer* rather than the writings.

"Think of it as Evolution in Action."