Grammar

I would like to talk to you about my experience with editors for a moment and specifically, grammar. I’ve had four people who have truly, ruthlessly gone over my work over the years. All four of them have much more experience than I do in writing, reading, and editing. They have not always agreed, which I’ve written about before: one might feel something needed a tweak one way, someone else thought it needed another, or sometimes what was perfect to one was not perfect to the other. That is the art of creating your story with your voice for the audience you want, which is not always your editor.

But generally, they agree 70% of the time, pointing the arrow toward the idea that there is such a thing as good writing. Of those four, two of them grated on me like running a rasp over my molars, and two of them poured honey from their digital pens directly into my ear and charmed me to change my ways.

What was different?

The ones I disliked, I disliked because lord almighty they reminded me of my middle school English teachers, who couldn’t see a forest for the trees. Forget the tree. The pine needles themselves. “Are you sure this is a comma? Is this really where you want a reader to pause?” or “This dangling participle is really taking me out of the story.” Or “You made up a word. You can’t make up words.”

Grammar... it's everywhere.

Grammarians.

That is the word I think of when I think of them both. Grammarians first, and readers of story second. The two who worked better with me made every single one of the same grammar corrections, give or take a few, but they were there for story first, and grammar as a mechanic by which to get it through. I would fix the grammar, of course, because they do know better than I do, but recently I’ve had to add a fifth editor to my stable of helpers, and I noticed another middle-of-the-road grammarian. And in my slightly older age and slightly more experienced state, I sat and wondered… are the grammarians less wrong than I thought?

“Walking through the forest, the wind howled around the knight.” This is a sentence which we probably understand to mean the wind howled around a knight who was walking through the forest, but what it says is that the wind walked through the forest. In a simple example, it’s no big deal. I usually wouldn’t make this mistake, but in larger sentences, I have dangled a participle with the best of them. And for some reason, this time, when my editor talked about it, I understood why she was taken out of the story because of my grammar.

I still think story is more important by far. I still think people who are slaves to grammar first are missing the point of reading. But if the grammar is going to interrupt the story, it’s like trying to read a book with someone else reaching over your shoulder and turning the pages back and forth, or constantly whispering something unrelated in your ear. You can’t get to the story because you can’t parse the meaning.

Anything which slows the reader down unintentionally is wrong grammar, bad story, bad sentences.

I’m not yet ready to embrace the idea that grammar is as important as the tale told, but I am ready to admit we need one or two full edits dedicated to it on our own. And it is hard. There is so much: pronoun agreement, number agreement, tense agreement, modifier misplacement, commas, run-on sentences, sentence fragments, etc. It’s a huge list. How do we do it?

One piece at a time. Pick the thing you are fixing. You won’t be good at it at first, but it’s one way to fix things. Read each sentence quietly to yourself, and then out loud, looking for one thing to fix. Is it right? Do it to a page. Pick a new thing to fix and run back down that page. Repeat until clean.

It’s hard. The first few times take the longest, but like everything, we get faster at it. Without it, you run the risk of losing the grammarians in your audience or the audience who simply can’t get past your bad grammar. It should be the last thing in your editorial journey that is done to a book. But it is time worth spending.