Writing is not talking

 

Grammar as a force of nature

Long ago and in another galaxy when I was a child at grade school I was terrible at writing.  Actually I was abysmal. My writing was incomprehensible. I was particularly bad at grammar and spelling.  One teacher wrote on my test paper that my spelling was very original. It was. My content was good, but it was hard to get at through all the gnarly grammar and spelling.  I did not care.

Some teachers liked me and wanted to help me – god bless ‘em. They got me books on grammar that had easy lessons and workbooks with exercises. I read the books and did the workbook exercises and finished them all correctly. But it had no effect on my writing. And I still didn’t care. Time passed and soon the day to go to college was not so far off. And that meant it was time to take tests which colleges would use to judge me on my acceptability. Now I was very good at math, science and history. I excelled at what we now call STEM. But as you already know I was hideous at what we then called English. It dawned on me that if I wanted to get into my college of choice and perhaps get a scholarship I needed to up my scores on the English tests.

Being a scientific/engineering kind of person, I approached the problem with an engineering frame of mind. I looked at my spelling and realized that many words I knew how to spell while many others I did not. The solution was simple; when writing an essay or any text on an exam never use a word when you are not totally certain of the spelling. There is always some other word that has the equivalent meaning which you can spell. This was my first encounter with the important life lesson: there is always another way.

I have worked for many years as a software engineer and what I discovered is that there are always bugs, issues, problems with the code you create. You never get it right the first time. No one does. Most of those bugs are relatively easy to fix in the sense that you know what is wrong and it’s not too hard to figure out how to fix it. But there are always a small percentage of bugs where you can’t figure out what is going wrong or you can’t figure out how to fix it. The hard bugs. The thing is if you think about it and play with it long enough you will either figure it out or figure out another way. There is always another way to get it to work. It may not be the best way, the most elegant way, the most direct way, the most satisfying way, but there is always a way. And in life as in software development there is always another way. Sometimes you just have to put in the work and the time to find it.

Back to writing things other than code. After figuring out the spelling fix I took a look at my essays. I discovered they were like a transcription of a conversation in my head between me and me. I was writing as if I was talking to someone. And talking is not writing or at least not good writing. What you might say to another person in conversation when put down on a page is often fairly incomprehensible when reading it. Suddenly I realized why you needed grammar and punctuation and organization. I got a book on grammar, the most simple and direct one I could find. Then I looked at my writing and made up a rule list of things I should and should not do. Most of it could be expressed as just refraining from incessantly blathering on as I had been doing. The next big English test I took I received the second highest mark in my grade. My grade consisted of one thousand two hundred students. It was a very large school. Some teachers found it hard to believe I did not cheat, but you can’t really cheat on an essay test. To take a phrase from tennis: I made no unforced errors. An unforced error is a mistake that is your own fault rather than due to the greater skill of your opponent. No bad grammar that could take points off my score.

Advice to writers usually includes instructions to read your work out loud. To get some objectivity on what you write. To encounter it as a reader does so you can see where it’s incomprehensible or glaringly rough. It is also good to know the rules of grammar and check your sentences to see if they comply. Of course some good and great writing is ungrammatical, but that’s another story.

I enjoyed blathering on in my writing and using words I couldn’t spell. But it wasn’t helping me get to my goal of a better mark on my tests. We all have three choices: what you want to do, what you like to do, and what is more helpful to do. Sure you might want to eat a whole chocolate fudge cake but eating a small slice might be a better idea or eating an apple even better. But that’s another story.