I’m sitting on the floor of a friend’s room in my residence hall, watching a movie with her and several others. One of the characters on the screen says, “Things are gonna turn out a little different,” and I hear one of our congregation automatically correct him: “Differently,” she says. I immediately look up at her and say, “No, it’s not.”
She looks down at me and frowns. “Actually, it is. He said that wrong.”
“No he didn’t,” I insist. “…Well, yes, he did, but it wasn’t incorrect.”
“Why?”
“Because…” and I have to pause for a second to gather my thoughts, “…because it’s appropriate. His character wouldn’t say ‘differently,’ because he isn’t the kind of person that cares about correct grammar.”
“Well that’s just an excuse to be sloppy!” she counters. “Grammar should be natural and automatic, because it’s important!”
“But—” I begin.
“SHUT UP!” everybody else says, and the girl and I are relegated to trading glowers every so often.
This discourse with my friend is certainly not the only of its kind. Both of us are avid writers, but we each have a different modus operandi for going about it. She’s a self-proclaimed grammar nazi (a title that I consider an egregious misnomer, mostly because a concern for grammatical correctness does not compare to the atrocities of the Nazi Party). And I? What do I call myself? Well, that’s a bit more difficult. If I had to give it a name, I’d call it grammatical pragmatism; I use grammar when it is necessary, and abandon it when appropriate.
Now, once you’re done snarling at the computer screen like a rabid Cerberus, take a moment to calm down and allow me to explain myself:
Yes, grammar is important. Standardized communication methodology is necessary for the effective conveyance of information. Structure is central to a writer’s work, and it’s important that every writer has an instinctual grasp of it.
But proper grammar can also get in the way of expression. I’ve had too many people look at my writing and tell me “Oh, that’s a sentence fragment and you can’t do that,” or say, “Ah-ah, this phrase isn’t supposed to be capitalized,” or the infamous “this comma is on the wrong side of the quotation marks!” Every time I hear somebody say things like this, I want to take a sturdy cricket bat and cave in their smug, fat face á la Shaun of the Dead.
Psychopathic retribution aside, I understand why there is such a harsh emphasis on “proper” grammar. It is important, especially in an academic community, to articulate oneself clearly and succinctly. It helps that your professors and your TAs can read your work and grasp the full meaning of it without tripping over awkward phrasing that skews your thesis, or poor structure that renders your arguments indiscernible.
But academics aside, I’m frustrated with the people who continue to hit me over the head with “The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation” whenever I make a deliberate decision to ignore the rules, especially when I’m writing stories or dialogues, or even feature narratives. All of these mediums have immense potential for experimentation in structural disobedience to affect the reader in unorthodox ways. Sentence fragments and misplaced clauses can work, as long as one is careful in handling them. It’s the little things that can be played with—dialogue arrangement, comma use, placement of words and sentences—to make written work compositionally expressive.
Grammar is not definitive of whether somebody’s writing is “good” or not; composition is. Don’t let this mean that you can get away with lazy editing and improper usage; you still have to use words and punctuation as they are used. But use them in ways that pulls your reader into the writing and enhances their suspension of disbelief. “Correct” doesn’t always mean “engaging.”
Are you bent on using Oxford commas? What would you do if someone ended a sentence with a preposition? Share your thoughts with Caleb at cbnesser@wisc.edu.
