When professional writers are asked “what are the books you keep within arm’s reach of your desk or computer?”, many of the lists have for years included Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is also popular, as is The Chicago Manual of Style and Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s delightful The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence. Dictionaries are still common, despite their availability on the web, as are thesauruses.

There is a reason for this.

It is a reason many, many would-be writers do not like to hear.

The reason is the other Big Three: grammar, spelling, and punctuation. They are at least as important as plot, characterization, and setting, possibly more so — because a reader or editor can usually spot poor grammar, spelling, or punctuation on page 1, frequently in paragraph 1, and may well stop reading there, whereas poorly handled plot, characterization, or setting usually take a bit longer to become evident.

Yet over and over, I see would-be writers (and their advisers) claim that correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation are unimportant. “That’s the editor’s job,” “The ideas are the important part,” and “The important thing is to just get the scene down; don’t worry about details like spelling or punctuation” are some of the claims made by people who don’t want to bother with “technical details.”

And they are so very wrong.

First of all, the editor’s job is to choose, out of a stack of 100 to 300+ manuscripts per week, the ones he thinks his readers will like. Yes, the stories he chooses will go through a copy-edit, where any remaining errors will hopefully be caught, but that’s part of making sure he doesn’t accidentally alienate some of his readers by offering them sloppy stuff. One would thing that the corollary would be obvious: the writer ought to try not to accidentally alienate any of his customers — the editors — by offering sloppy stuff that will make the editor’s job harder (more mistakes to correct).

Second, ideas are the easy part; they’re all over. The hard part is getting them down in pixels (or electrons) effectively. Part of getting ideas down effectively is getting the grammar, spelling, and punctuation right (see “accidentally alienating readers,” above).

Third…well, IF what works for you is to get the scene down and only then fix the grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and IF you really DO go back and fix it once the scene is down, I will grudgingly allow that it could be a valid working method for some people. In my experience, however, there are two problems with this approach. The first is that allowing oneself to write sloppy prose that needs fixing tends, again in my experience, to lead to the writing of sloppier and sloppier prose, which makes revising hellish and ends up being more work than it’s worth.

The second reason is a little harder to articulate. Style is an important aspect of writing. The careful choice of words, the rhythm of sentences, the flow of paragraphs all contribute to the word-picture that the writer builds up of whatever action or emotion or idea she is trying to convey. If a sentence is grammatically wrong, it usually doesn’t function effectively to get across what the writer is trying to say. Incorrect spelling and punctuation trip many readers up, jerking them out of the story.

None of these are good things…and there is often a ripple effect that makes fixing them in revision harder than one might expect. Turning a sentence fragment into something grammatically correct can make the sentences around it cease to work — the rhythm is off, there are clunky redundancies…it’s as if someone put a green filter over the TV screen. More things need fixing, not because they’re incorrect, but because they just aren’t in balance any more. It’s a lot easier, in my opinion, to get it right the first time around, if I can.

But the thing I really don’t get is…most of the people who think that grammar, spelling, and punctuation don’t matter are the same people who are always looking for The Rulez 4 Writing. They want rules for characterization, for action, for plot, for number and position of adverbs and adjectives…but they react like a tribble facing a Klingon to being told that they should pay some attention to the things in writing that actually do have rules: grammar, spelling, and punctuation. How much sense does that make?

20 Comments
  1. I teach English here in Spain and the more I teach it the more I appreciate grammar. The subtle differences in the use of language make a huge difference to a novel.

    With such daily awareness of the language forced into my head I can use grammar to create stronger distinctions in my characters and in the narration.

  2. As to your final paradox, I think it’s chiefly a fruit of real (but limited) observation. The rules of grammar – especially as often sort-of-taught in schools – are, demonstrably, things that good writers break quite often. Combine this with the too-frequent experience of the rest of school ‘composition’ – being told to write about subjects in which one has no interest, in forms one does not really get, in order to produce box-ticking output which not even the writer really wishes to read – and the motive for chucking the baby out with the bathwater becomes apparent.

    Given that the rules one was taught don’t seem to result in good writing, it is quite easy to take the next step along the primrose path by assuming that there must be some other and ‘non-crappy’ set of rules by which Those In The Know operate.

    It is a fault of noticing that there are differences (which vindicate me! Yes! Sucks to be you, Miss Crabapple!) whilst failing to register the much larger overlap – or where the root difference, the difference between practice pieces by rote and the practised work of fluent mastery, really lies.

    And failing, most especially, to notice what is the common denominator of most completely unreadable drivel. (Why? What has that got to do with my writing?! And why would I waste time reading crap like that anyway, lolz?!!!?!!)

  3. I’m in an advanced creative writing class in college right now. You’d think at this level basic grammar would be a given, but I still can’t go one day without seeing someone mix up “there,” “their,” and “they’re.” It’s very frustrating.

    • Alex – I was fortunate enough to be really, really taught grammar in grammar school (anyone else remember diagramming sentences?), and on into high school. I hated it, but now I look on it as very similar to pianists who have to play scales and exercises over and over until their fingers know where the keys are.

      Gray – I’d like to think you’re right, but in my grumpier moments I suspect that this whole obsessive search for Da Rulz is a giant red herring, perhaps meant to distract everyone else from noticing how bad the searcher’s own prose is. Or maybe it’s just the first step in the Evil Overlord’s secret plan for world domination, I dunno.

      Kaitlin – What I find even more frustrating are the English and Language Arts and Creative Writing teachers who tell their classes, from first grade on, that the important thing is to get the words down, grammar doesn’t matter. At least in the lower grades, they mean well – they’re trying to take some of the pressure off kids who are still struggling with which letters look like what, by having them do one thing at a time. You’d think that by the time they’re teaching at college level, they’d know better, but I still hear the same things when I go to talk to college CW students.

  4. The truly unfortunate thing is that these people will go out into the real world having NO idea what they’re doing wrong. Teachers tend to think that because it’s “Creative” writing you don’t have to follow ANY of the rules.

    Of course, you don’t have to follow ALL of them. Sometimes, you just HAVE to start a sentence with “but” or “and.”

    You should come do a seminar at my college. We’ve got a big creative writing following here (we’ve had Brandon Mull and Orson Scott Card here a couple of times) and maybe you could smack some sense into them!

  5. What you maybe ought to understand Kaitlin, is that it’s perfectly possible to make those kind of errors while still knowing perfectly well which one is which. I took a “there-their-they’re-its-it’s test online, and I got a perfect score. And yet my manuscripts are full of this kind of error. Why?

    Because when I type, the muscle-memory in my fingers takes dictation. I know which word is which, but the muscle memory in my fingers does not — it triggers on the sound of the word, not the meaning. So the wrong word gets inserted into the manuscript. When I go back over the manuscript, I have trouble seeing these errors. I read what is supposed to be there, not what is there.

    I have no problem with people telling me that I need to hunt those mistakes down and clean them up. But I do have problems with people going into rants about people who can’t be bothered to learn basic grammar. In my case it’s not really a gramatical error at all. It’s just another kind of typo–one that the spell-checker can’t catch. I have the same problem with ALL common homophones.

    And, from looking at who else out there makes these kinds of mistakes, it is perfectly obvious to me that I am not the only one with this particular problem. So, um, just be aware that not everyone’s brains work the same, and that people can be making errors for different reasons than you think.

  6. They’re/their/there mixups are typos, not grammar mistakes, in my view. The difference in them is purely an artifact of the way English is customarily written; the distinction does not exist in spoken language. But remember, this is a language where spelling contests make sense.

    I virtually never make that mistake, but that’s because English is, for me, primarily a written language (having learned it in school as a second language).

  7. I learned more about English grammar in my first Latin class than most of my elementary school education. The teacher put a sentence on the board and asked us to identify the direct object, which led to a discussion about in/transitive verbs and in/direct objects and helping verbs. And then she wondered what he had spent the last 7 years of our life learning.

    What gets me is that normal, colloquial English throws most basic rules out the window. “How are you?” “I’m doing good” <– That sets my teeth on edge every time, even when I am guilty. People give me funny looks when I speak in such a way so as not to end a sentence with a preposition. The other thing that got me was this University level class where the professor told us to write about what we feel. We could even use the word “I”. It was all about the emotion and none of the fundamentals. I know academic writing is different but basic rule should still apply.

    That said, you might enjoy these:
    this and this

  8. I don’t know if the first link worked so here it is again
    http://pix.motivatedphotos.com/2009/1/31/633690429598782760-spellingpolice.jpg

  9. That post makes a lot of sense! When I know that someone actually cares about correct grammar and punctuation, if I see a written mistake, I think it is probably just something they didn’t notice in their writing. The way some people speak makes my nerves sharp as a knife, though. “Your work is doing pretty good.” for example. *Well!*

    Anyway, I absolutely love grammar. Your ‘Big Three’ is *huge* for me! 🙂

  10. As a reader, I am on the side of impeccable grammar and spelling. If I’m reading along, lost in the story, and suddenly find a clunky bit of grammar or misused word, I just lose the story while I go back and figure out what it should have been.
    We had a discussion on one of the railway sites about movies that make errors in the railway scenes — the most obvious being trains that change several times during a trip — down to just using equipment from the wrong era or area. We notice it but it doesn’t disturb the layman.
    When I went though high school, a number of grammatical mistakes were counted as major errors (disagreement of number, wrong case, malapropisms/illiteracies) and 3 of them would fail an essay.
    I’ve since read so much badly done writing that I’ve lost a lot of my fine edge.

    • Michelle – Yes, but you know you mix up homonyms, so you don’t let your stories out into the wild without checking first, right? At least, not past your first-readers. That’s different from not caring at all. One of my writer friends is mildly dyslexic and can’t spell for anything…but he doesn’t even run things past his first readers without running the spelling checker.

      Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho – The difference between there, they’re, and their isn’t purely a matter of spelling; there are places where they’re actually pronounced slightly differently (like merry, marry, and Mary, or ant and aunt). So it’s possible that the difference is a holdover from a time when they were pronounced differently by pretty much everyone.

      accio_aqualung – Love the posters! Yes, colloquial and informal English is more relaxed about some things. Some of it is fine – colloquial English is, after all, supposed to be informal! – but there are still usages like “ain’t” that are seriously problematic.

      David – That’s the trouble with writing – you can’t ever be an expert in everything, so even if you do research, you make mistakes with stuff like railroads that actual experts find off-putting. The thing is that words (and spelling and grammar and punctuation) are supposed to be the thing WRITERS are expert in, which means getting them wrong ought to be really, really embarassing.

  11. While I agree that grammar and spelling are important I have to ask, what about when one has a first-person narrator who uses dialect?

    • Chicoy – First-person narrators are an exception to a lot of rules. Hmm, maybe it’s time to post some more on viewpoint…

  12. Yes, I check over my manuscripts for those errors.

    Guess what, in my last manuscript, by the time I had gotten down my copy edit check-list to the “there search” ie typing “there”, “their” and “they’re” into my search box and checking each and every one in the manuscript to see if its right, I had *none* of that kind of error. It was a novella manuscript, but still I felt pretty proud of myself.

    But learning to *not* make the error required me understanding what the error really was. Learning rules I already knew didn’t help. Training myself gradually over a period of years, to catch myself typing a there and check if it was the right one, was what was needed. (I wish it had been learning rules, it would have been much easier.)

    Now, if only I could get on top of those blasted commas!

    • Michelle – Well, congratulations on getting the “theres” down, and good luck with the commas. But see, that’s my point. You know it’s important, so you work at fixing it. About half of the would-be writers I meet don’t think it’s important, or think that it’s not their job to make sure their manuscripts aren’t riddled with typos, mis-punctuated, and so on. They are the ones I’m ranting at.

  13. Yes, well, I agreed with your rant, Pat, and I always have agreed with your rant.

    I was riffing off of someone else’s comment. And then once I got into that particular rut, I kept on supporting that point, and you kept on supporting your point.

    Wonderful example of two people talking right past each other. 🙂

    Ah well, my last post provides a description of a good technique for people to use when putting your point into action, so maybe I managed to contribute something worthwhile to the conversation.

    • Michelle – I knew that

      Seriously – it was well worth putting that reminder out there. To me, getting the grammar and spelling and so on right (including homonyms!) is much like touch-typing; the nuns back in grade school drilled us mercilessly enough that not making usage errors got to be as much a habit as using my left index finger to hit the “g” and “f” keys. For most of the grammar and syntax stuff, I think working this way is an advantage for me – getting it right makes it easier to make the sentences do what I want. For homonyms, that part isn’t so important (using “their” instead of “there” doesn’t change the rhythm of the sentence, or, usually, affect what you wanted to say or thought you were saying)…but getting the homonyms right on the first try means I DON’T have to go through the tedious process of search-and-check that you described, which is a good enough reason for me to want to do it! So sometimes I forget that there are folks out there who CAN’T get the habit in quite the same way, like my dyslexic niece. So it’s good you said it.

  14. One aggravation I seem to run into with increasing frequency is, “Who cares about spelling? The spell-checker will catch it.”

    As a result, this morning I had the pleasure of reading a story in which the poor protagonist was stuck somewhere for five minuets.

    • Hi, Bruce! Very true; on the other hand, I get endless amusement out of the spelling checker’s suggestions for the “right” way to spell my last name (it’s why I’ve never added it to the word list, which is sort of cheating, but I’ll take my amusement where I can get it.