The grammar wars

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 5

Grammar: such an oddly touchy subject among writers. There are two warring camps on this subject.

There are the rules keepers—those writers who feel they know the rules and become agitated at others’ errors. Some extremists are frozen in time, insisting people adhere to outdated rules. These old-school purists do not approve of splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions, despite what the latest edition of the Holt Handbook permits. They take care to avoid any such manual published within the last few decades, so they neither know which former grammar no-no’s have become acceptable, nor do they want to know.

Ironically, rules keepers are plagued with a curse. Anyone who writes about grammar or rails against some usage pet peeve in print will have, embedded in her diatribe, at least one grammatical error. I remember when Brian first pointed out this phenomenon to me years ago, and I have yet to see it disproven. It is some kind of inevitability, perhaps a joke the universe plays on us to remind us that perfection is unattainable.

The copyeditors (professional rules keepers, no less) of a nearby major metropolitan newspaper have a contest each year to see who can locate the first typo or grammatical error in the latest edition of the AP Stylebook (you know, journalists’ grammar bible). It never takes them more than 30 minutes to find one. C’mon, I bet you can locate one in this very blog entry, though I promise I haven’t intentionally put any in.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the grammar bohemians who play free and loose with language. They don’t worry about grammar, either believing it’s a waste of time and something for lowly proofreaders and editors--not true artistes--to fret over, or thinking their intentional disregard of grammatical conventions is essential to their unique writing style and conveys some deeper meaning. They see themselves as iconoclastic rebels, and they view the rules keepers as dull pedants.