Grammatically speaking

I collect words the way some people collect objects. I have my favourites and periodically I like to take them out and examine them, thereby reacquainting myself with an old friend, perhaps forgotten for a time. I get a little thrill when I find the perfect word to express a thought. I love quotations (I used to read Bartlett’s by the hour) and yes, I love grammar. The word makes me smile just to say it: grammar. It’s so delightfully old-fashioned and schoolmarm-ish. I used to love parsing sentences: all those underlines and squiggles and brackets combining and collaborating to make a run-of-the-mill sentence a complex work of art. To me the process was fun, this uncovering and identifying and tracking of pronouns and clauses and subjective completions and transitive verbs. It was like a treasure hunt.

I am definitely not a pedant—I am too lazy. And I like a little artistic freedom. All in the name of communication and style, of course. But I do espouse the belief that you must first know the rules in order to break them. I can be rather particular about certain grammatical constructions. March 4 was National Grammar Day (really, who decides these things?) So here, in no particular order, are a collection of… hmmm, let’s call them grammar observations. Maybe they’re more like general guidelines I tend to follow when I write or perhaps irksome grammar ‘traps’. Here they are. Just between us girls. 

1. Everyone. Strictly speaking, ‘everyone’ is singular, thus requiring a singular verb, and a singular pronoun for reference. Sticklers would have you say: ‘Everyone is eating his or her favourite flavour of ice cream.’ Well, write that in your next Facebook status update (or worse, say it) and you sound like an ass. Substitute ‘his’ for ‘his or her’ and you sound like a sexist ass. Result: it has become acceptable to say ‘Everyone is eating their favourite flavour of ice cream.’ I still cringe a little when I hear it, or when I find myself writing or saying it. Typically I try to re-write sentences to avoid this kind of construction, but there are always situations where that is impossible. So I grin and bear it and go with the flow.

2. ‘Which witch?’ I am a vigilant ‘which’ hunter. It can almost always be replaced with ‘that’. Try it. You’ll love the results.

3. Don’t overstate it. I am a big fan of the Strunk & White reference ‘The Elements of Style’. A favourite rule of construction I try to abide by: remove the word ‘very’ wherever it appears. Sound advice (very).

4. Subject vrs Object. Oh dear, the dreaded decision whether to use ‘I’ or ‘me’. In stiffly grammatical terms, it is the choice between using the subjective or objective case of the first person singular. Problem with this construction is that the use of ‘me’ often sounds wrong, even though it’s correct. Consider this example: ‘The taxi was waiting for you and me.’ To some ears, this sounds wrong but IT IS CORRECT. Here’s a little test you can use. To check if the construction is correct, remove the first person plural (in this case, the ‘you’). The sentence then reads: ‘The taxi was waiting for me.’ Which, you will agree, sounds perfectly fine. You’re not even tempted to use ‘I’ in that instance.

5.  All sentences must contain a subject and a verb. Oh. Please. 

6. Never start a sentence with a conjunction. Whatever.

7. Use the serial comma. This is the comma that appears before ‘and’ in a list of three or more. It just looks better. Trust me.

8. Misplaced modifiers. This is where grammar gets funny. Consider this example: “Walking to the car, the ice was slippery.” Well, actually, no, it wasn’t. Walking to the car that is. The ice may have been slippery but it wasn’t walking to the car. A couple of options are available to correct this. The best solution is to introduce a subject: “Walking to the car, Bill found the ice was slippery.” Grammar Girl http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com (one of my favourite quick resources on all things grammatical) reminds us that whatever the phrase refers to should immediately follow the comma.

9. And by way of summary, (although ruthless), a favourite quote by Samuel Johnson serves as the best general writing guideline I have come across. 

“Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

Indeed.

Comments

[Sue_boggs]

Number always feels, in the words of Mr. Groves, my Grade 13 English teacher, a bit like killing one's own child. But it is good advice nevertheless!