The grammar wars con't.

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 7

So which side do we represent in this war? Are we judging entries with the eagle eyes of the rules keepers or the freewheeling nonchalance of the grammar bohemians?

Brian and I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, between those two extremes but admittedly closer to the former camp than the latter. If the grammar and mechanics errors in a piece are rampant, we do lower the presentation score. Someone who wants to be a writer but has no understanding of the fundamentals is conveying laziness and a lack of respect for the medium.

It’s like a painter who doesn’t know how to mix colors. You can’t cut corners and skip ahead from basic skills to advanced execution. You have to put in the effort and learn how to use your artistic tools, and your tools are words. Expecting someone else to fix it all for you later is not only arrogant but naïve. No one else is going to care about your work as much as you do.

Improper use of language is a burden on your reader. You know what you’re trying to say, but if you completely ignore the rules of language, your reader will likely become frustrated and have to read each sentence multiple times, mentally inserting the proper punctuation and filling in the gaps in order to make sense of your work. If that is the case, you have failed in your attempt to express yourself. And don’t tell me you had to reread Shakespeare or Faulkner’s sentences in order to understand them. There is a difference between writing that is difficult to read because it is complex and writing that is incomprehensible because it follows no known conventions of language.

Now that I’ve ticked off the grammar bohos, let me add that we understand that grammar is ever-changing, and we don’t cling stubbornly to outdated rules or feel the need to enforce rules just for the principle of the matter. Too, we know that formatting and punctuation errors beyond the author’s control sometimes happen in cyberspace, so we are not taking five points off for every misused comma or anything like that. We don’t penalize for minor errors that don’t interfere with readability (or, of course, that seem intentional and effectively serve a function in the entry). Grammar mistakes tend to fade into the background and be forgotten in the presence of a well-crafted, original plot, fascinating characters, and sparkling dialogue, and those higher-order concerns are what jump out at us most of all.

But when we read an entry that excels in those other categories but also doesn’t have any glaring errors, it shows us that the piece has been carefully edited, that the writer is probably well read and knowledgeable about his craft, and that he has put as much time and passion into the revision as he put into the writing, and we find that impressive. Those are the entries that get an immediate ticket to the ‘yes’ stack.