I number among those generations who ‘benefited’ from the happy-clappy notion that learning grammar was old hat and writing should be all about the vibe, man.
Trying to write without understanding the basics of grammar is like trying to build a house without knowing how to use a nail gun. My sixth grade teacher, who I believe was in her late fifties at the time, was the only person in my entire twelve years of schooling who tried to impart any grammar to her students. The next time I encountered grammar was via a lecturer at university, who was appalled to learn most of his literature students didn’t know a verb from an adverb, let alone what a gerund might be.
Because my career and my chief hobby have both immersed me in language, I have, by osmosis, picked up an adequate understanding of grammar. Not just that a verb is a doing word and an adverb describes a verb, but the proper usage of language – ‘less’ versus ‘fewer’, for example, or making sure there is no subject confusion in a sentence.
Here’s a fabulous example of the latter that I encountered from a supposedly professional writer:
“I keep coming back to this southwest corner of Western Australia. I like its bracing air and need for sweaters.”
The image of Western Australia pulling on a jumper was so amusing that I was tempted to publish it unchanged under this numpty’s byline. But it’s not really amusing, it’s disgraceful. Communication is the foundation of civilised society and journalists are its foremost practitioners. A distressing cross-section of them couldn’t write to save their lives. Take this pearler from a major newspaper:
“They are the feathered chip-stealers that congregate on cricket fields with complete disregard for the danger they place their own lives in.”
Every time I get towards the end of that ‘sentence’ my mind starts to flinch, as if it’s witnessing a car crash. Which, in grammatical terms, it is. Once upon a time a sub-editor would have read it and then screamed across the office, “Who wrote this shit?” Nowadays, sub-editing is outsourced to people who are overworked and underqualified, or folks in India who wouldn’t know concise writing if it jumped off the screen and did a Bollywood dance number.
Defending grammar in the social media age can feel like a lost cause. Let us be thankful, then, that there are still bastions of grammatical propriety. In five years of subscribing to Esquire, I have noted only one grammatical faux pas in its flawless and envy-inspiring prose (although it was a big one and a bugbear of mine – ‘could care less’ instead of ‘couldn’t care less’). And for every James Patterson and E. L. James in the fiction world there is an author who knows how to balance a line of prose or an editor who sends a rejection slip to an author who doesn’t. The actor and author Stephen Fry is a staunch defender of proper writing and is not afraid to belittle those who misuse words and should know better. The English, above all others, still seem to care about English.
If you’re considering a career as a journalist or an author, it behoves you to understand the rules of grammar and apply them to everything you write, even emails. Not every editor is a pedant for spelling and grammar – especially in the slapdash world of online publishing – but why take the chance?