Good Grammar-Used Well

It’s snowing again, painting another winter scene across the yard. I love it. The road is covered with ice and snow, traffic has stopped moving, and once again I have a legitimate excuse for not going anywhere. It’s a writer’s dream come true—nothing to interfere, nothing to distract me from the work at hand. I only hope the power doesn’t fail. I would be left with just a couple of hours of battery life on my old Vaio computer. If that happens, I will have to rely on my other computer, my trusty old Eberhard-Faber Model 2.0, no battery required. (That is not a typewriter.)

I can barely remember what it was like before we enjoyed computers and word processing software. My first real attempts at writing were banged out on an old Royal, a typing machine from a bygone era. I was posting weekly devotionals for our church members and I was typing five carbon copies at a time. (What was a carbon copy?) In order to prepare enough copies for every family, I had to repeat the process four times: slow, inefficient, and filled with grammatical gaffes. I have never recovered. To this day, my use of grammar is a challenge.

Good grammar is, more or less, a necessary evil. It is an assault on creativity, forcing a somewhat disorderly, creative mind to become regimented, engaging in a process that is unimaginative at best, and boring as all get out. The rules of grammar are inflexible, or mostly so. They are often ignored when people speak and all too often when they write, as well. But, bad grammar does not produce good reading.

For the individual who  is serious about being a writer, grammar rules. Without it, writing loses its capacity to clearly express the thoughts and perspectives of the writer. The proper use of grammar separates the veteran writer from the novice and the serious from the frivolous. If you have a message to convey that is worthy of being read, you need to use good grammar. If you don’t know it, study it. Learn how to use language correctly, so that when you abuse it, that will be obvious and will obviously be on purpose.