Happy Grammar Day

Today, March 4, 2010 is Grammar Day! This year, National Grammar Day is hosted by Mignon Fogarty, also known to many of us as Grammar Girl. (Today is also, coincidentally, my father’s birthday; happy birthday, Dad!) So, what does one do to celebrate Grammar Day? Well, to begin with, I’m not going to give you any lessons on correct usage today. I mean, I’m really excited that I know the difference between:

• lay and lie
• differ from and differ with
• the comma splice and a “regular” run-on
• why it actually IS okay to split an infinitive…

Ok. I’m stopping now. The list above is starting to get me in the mood to write some sort of “lesson” or tips, and that’s not what celebrating grammar is for me…yes, I know I just earned my egghead title with that sentence. My biggest interest in grammar and punctuation is actually not the rules; the rules are easy enough to read, memorize, and always go back to check if you are feeling uncertain. My interest in grammar is in the effect that it has on writing and the very strong feelings that grammar rules can incite in writers.

While still actively agenting, I fought tooth and nail with a client about the placement of one comma. He insisted that it fell under the rule in CMOS (that’s Chicago Manual of Style to you non-nerds) of “only if needed for clarity.” I strongly disagreed, since the sentence spanned about six lines and had at least four adjectival or adverbial phrases in it. In the end, after five minutes—and, in truth, that was still four minutes and thirty seconds longer than it should have been—I stopped talking, confident in the fact that a publishing house wasn’t going to pass on a manuscript based on the absence of a few commas, so the argument was truly not worth it.

After, I couldn’t stop coming back to it, as I thought about why on earth one freaking comma would matter so much to him—yes, and in turn me, but at the time I didn’t realize I was the pot and he the kettle. The longer I’ve worked in copyediting and proofreading, the more I’ve realized hard and fast rules aren’t actually there for the wordsmither to hammer in stone onto every manuscript.

If hard and fast rules were, indeed, what every writer should practice every time, then we’d have no James Joyce (Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake), no T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, the brilliant poetry of e.e. cummings (my favorite poet), and well, oh so many others. As an editor, what a lot of people don’t realize is that one of the biggest parts of my job is to find the style and tone of the author, get comfortable with it, and then let that tone be my guide.

Following certain rules blindly is always ridiculous, even if they’re grammar and punctuation rules. For instance, many things that I’ve dealt with recently are dialect, a penchant for commas, a refusal to use the Oxford comma, etc. When I do thesis or dissertation editing, I go with the hard and fast rules, don’t get me wrong. But style is an important part of any writers’ work, and ignoring certain “rules” to fully embrace your style. Today, Grammar Day 2010, I’m enjoying proofreading and copyediting, and sticking to the rules that have been ingrained into me. But, this afternoon, when I begin working on a fiction copyediting gig for a UK author, or even later this evening, when I begin typing away at my own novel again, I’ll bend the rules I can and even break a few, because when it comes to your work, your tone, your vision, be true to it. Even if Strunk & White wouldn’t approve.

Words of wisdom and sarcasm on the grammar & mechanics of writing:

“Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” ~Kurt Vonnegut

“American grammar doesn’t have the sturdiness of British grammar (a British advertising man with a proper education can make magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddam Carta), but it has its own scruffy charm.” ~Stephen King

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.” ~Joan Didion

“Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays.”  ~George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

“When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.” ~Raymond Chandler

“Grammar stops at love, and at art.”  ~Valentine Sterling

“I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

“Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.” ~E. B. White