To Boldly Write What I Want to

The practice of writing everyday through 30-day challenges has been an exercise in many things. Among them…

Finding time
Identifying a topic
Not allowing myself to become distracted by others’ agendas

Perhaps the greatest challenge for me in the last 16 days has been knowing when to stop editing. I am a compulsive self-editor measuring every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and essay until I either cannot read it again or just decide it is time to let it go.

Not once, thus far, has it been time to let it go.

There are people in our world who fancy themselves expert grammarians. These are the people who always correct you when you say or write things like, “What cruise ship were you on?” or “I am going to carefully weigh my options.” They are overly concerned with the rule of law as it pertains to grammar while overlooking the spirit of law which, with regard to language, is to ensure clarity of expression. Their assistance is less about educating you than is it about patronizing you. Perhaps it’s a relic of my school days, but I’ll admit my fear of being called out by the grammar trolls has prevented me from ever being satisfied with my final product.

Now…before anyone begins crafting their grammatically-flawless rebuttal, let me clarify. I do believe that using proper grammar is important in any form of communication. That includes email and texting. On its surface, poor grammar is equated with ignorance, lack of education, or carelessness, but on a deeper level it can serve to diminish the effectiveness of one’s message. Most grammar rules exist to make sure that we precisely communicate our thoughts. When these rules are repeatedly ignored, one risks ambiguity at best and at worst erosion of the audience’s confidence in (or even their willingness to hear) the message.

When I edit in this forum, my goal is a maximum of 4 passes. In the first I look for grammatical errors (“its” vs. “it’s”; “they’re” vs. “there” vs. “their; dropped apostrophes; misspelled words)…anything that makes the sentence unintelligible. Pass number 2 is for culling redundancies, removing sentences and paragraphs that feel unnecessary, or for cleaning up clunky construction. The third pass is to read what, in a perfect world, will be the final product – mostly to ensure that any previous editing didn’t create more problems. Depending on how that 3^rd pass goes, I may or may not do a fourth. This has happened maybe 10% of the time.

The other 90% looks like this:

I start reading for grammar and realize that I am shifting tenses all over the place. This becomes an obsession and I read the rest of the piece looking only for incorrect tense. At the end, I realize I neglected everything else. Pass 2 is then focused on all the grammar I missed…but the phone rings and instead of ignoring it I answer it or I don’t answer but worry about what I am missing as I continue to skim the rest. Once again, I reach the end and know that I missed something. Pass 3 is for grammar again, but the part of my brain that has been silent about content up to this point just can’t keep quiet anymore and so I start noticing things that need to be rewritten and/or taken out altogether. As I’m doing that, I realize that I’m missing the grammar but I’ll catch it next time, right? Because I need to check the grammar on what I just rewrote/retooled.  Pass 4, I’m supposed to be reading for grammar, but I still don’t love how the paragraphs are organized. I realize I need to fill my water glass because my throat is dry so I walk away -- without completing the pass – and tell myself that looking at it in a few minutes with fresh eyes will be better. This is when radio station KFKD starts playing. You can see where this is going….days like this it takes as many as 7 or 8 passes before I click publish.

Process aside there a few grammar rules that cause consternation just about every time.

Finishing a sentence with a preposition,
Using “their” as a singular pronoun, and
Splitting infinitives.

I fixate on these regularly spending lots of time reworking sentences that make perfect sense into longer, more awkward sentences that say the same thing, but in a way that make me want to punch myself in the throat. It’s because I was taught in every single English class from kindergarten to college that they are without exception incorrect.

Lies.

Beginning today, I am cutting myself slack where these rules are concerned because I can – and I need the extra 5 hours a week to sleep. Thank you to my good friends at Mental Floss for providing me the justification. Grammar trolls read here before you comment. And while you’re at it, read here too.

These are not examples of rules that textbook writers have capriciously decided to ignore because if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. No one is suggesting that it’s ok to say “on tomorrow” or “on yesterday”.

Because let me be clear…it is not.

Nor is anyone suggesting that other useful grammatical rules be tossed out the window. The sentence, “Your a idiot,” is patently nonsensical. Yes…when I see it, I know what is meant so there is some clarity of expression (incorrect form of You’re notwithstanding), but anyone who spoke those words would sound like the idiot because the correct article should be “an.” I would also hope to avoid the following faux pas: “All 10 of us face-planted into our bed.” That is only correct if there are in fact ten people sharing the same bed. Hopefully, I would never be sharing a bed with 9 other people so I would rewrite that to say, “All 10 of us face-planted into our respective beds.” 

Conversely, use of “hopefully” at the beginning of a sentence (as in the previous sentence) will henceforth be acceptable. Here is another example of something I’ll be ignoring from now on. I could rewrite that to say, “Here is another example of something that from now on I’ll be ignoring,” but does it really make the sentence clearer? No. Moving on. Preposition at the end. Not sorry.

The rules discussed in this particular article are essentially made up. The truth is, George Bernard Shaw split his infinitives, Jane Austen used “they” as a singular pronoun and if I want to end my sentences in a preposition, I will. And if any grammar trolls want to take issue with it, prepare to be ignored because your fanaticism is showing.

It’s easy for me to forget when writing – especially when I’m just blogging – that there is nothing particularly precious about any of it so I don't need to handle it with grammatical kid gloves. It’s my creation, yes, but I create really pitiful things all the time. Ask me to make bread…9 times out of 10, it will taste like chalk and go down like a brick and that’s only if I can get it to form. Ask me to sew something that isn’t a series of straight lines…it will be mediocre at best. I draw house plans when I get bored, I make up choreography for ABBA songs, and I create movie treatments from crazy stories that I read in the local section of our newspaper. None of them are good, but I’m not fraught with anxiety about how they will be received by the public because I don’t share them. It’s true I may care more about what I write because I do choose to share it but the outcomes aren’t going to have any fewer examples of garbage than any other endeavor – not as a percentage anyway. That’s the nature of the creative process. Thus, spending hours on grammatical rules that aren’t even real is fruitless.

I’m revamping my editing process today and we will see how it goes. The first pass is going to be for clarity of expression…am I saying what I want to say and does it all flow in a coherent manner when read from beginning to end? The second pass will be for spelling, punctuation, run-on sentences, and not for prepositions at the end of sentences, split infinitives, and places where I might have begrudgingly put “he or she” before.

I’ll be calling on my inner psychopath – who never cares what anyone thinks – to make this happen. I’ll need every single one of my 18 points from the PCL-R to not care quite so much.