My grammar biography

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 15

For the sake of providing some background and context to this issue, I have a nerdy confession: I’m a little disappointed that I’ve never been asked to diagram a sentence. My grandfather used to work as the art director for a publisher and sometimes sent us language arts textbooks. I remember as a 3rd grader reading the chapters on diagramming with true awe: a mixture of fascination and horror. This was mysterious, complex, big-kid stuff, like algebra or chemistry.

I believed that one day I’d know all the fancy words for parts of speech and learn how and where to draw those lines and symbols, dissecting sentences with a full understanding of exactly what made them tick. Somehow, things didn’t work out that way.

The Chomskian idea of innate linguistic knowledge I referred to in my last entry has been so much in vogue the last few decades that formal grammar instruction has virtually been done away with. [We don’t need to teach grammar—the kids pick it up naturally from reading!] My last grammar lesson was in 7th grade—from then on, English classes consisted solely of reading and analyzing fiction, poetry, and drama. We had to write essays and papers, but we were pretty much on our own as far as figuring out language mechanics. I’m sure I made the same small errors over and over, but I never had the kind of teacher who took points off for minor errors, so I was never motivated to correct myself.

In college, there was a grammar/history of the language course offered, but I’d heard rumors of how difficult it was from the secondary education-track English majors who were required to take it. I studied my catalog and discovered that, since I wasn’t seeking teacher certification, I could substitute a literature class on 20th century American poetry for the grammar course. I told all my fellow English majors about this loophole and single-handedly caused a spike in registration for that poetry class, which consisted of meeting at our professor’s house one night a week to eat soup and gossip about the lives of well-known poets. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed the poetry course, but it wasn’t long before I was regretting my cowardly registration choice.

There I was in the mid-1990s, an English degree in hand but no real grammar know-how beyond the ‘this sounds correct’ basics I’d intuitively picked up along the way. I was occasionally asked to proofread something for a job and felt like a fraud but muddled my way through, marking egregious errors and ignoring whatever I wasn’t sure about. Then one day, my boyfriend (yep, he’s the one) enlisted my help with editing his novel, and suddenly the stakes were higher than they’d ever been.