The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

Learn Punctuation and Grammar

71 Learn Punctuation and Grammar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brace yourself: This is my “be sure to eat your peas” chapter. I wouldn’t be including it if I hadn’t noticed lately a pervasive problem : My students don’t know how to punctuate dialogue. Dialogue punctuation isn’t their only problem, however.They don’t know how to use commas, semicolons, or colons. They leave off end punctuation .Theydon’t indent. I’ll point out these problems, write correct examples on the board, and explain why what they’re doing is wrong. The one thing I can’t do is learn it for them.Their excuses are lame at best. Sometimes they’ll blame it on their computer, but more often than not they’ll say, “I thought this was just a rough draft,” to which I reply, “No one—no one—who knows how to punctuate correctly would punctuate incorrectly and consistently in a rough draft! If you know the correct punctuation, you would simply use the correct punctuation.” What all of this suggests to me is that my students aren’t reading, or, if they are reading, they’re not paying attention to what they read. How can someone read novel after novel and not begin to see the difference between the possessive and the plural ? (Remember what I wrote in an earlier chapter about liking sentences ?) While I was working toward my PhD, those of us who taught Comp 101 were trained to tell students not to worry about punctuation and grammar when they wrote. My wife, who was also working toward a PhD, brought up during a faculty meeting the crazy idea of using a grammar handbook in a composition classroom, and she was almost laughed out of the room by the composition theorists. One of them, unable to stop laughing, said, “Oh, my, I could just imagine spending the whole day discussing the dash.” In our composition theory classes, the professors would say to us, “Grammar is patriarchal!”— whatever that meant. I still don’t know. I’m guessing it means that grammar is repressive. The teaching assistants were also told by our composition professors that grammar couldn’t be taught. To that, I say, “Bullshit!” Of course it can be taught; otherwise, no one would know how to punctuate or write a grammatically correct sentence. Years later, I saw an essay in an academic journal co-​ written by one of my composition theory professors. It began (and I’m paraphrasing ), “Staring out my office window, the city spread out before 72 Education and the Writer me.” This was the essay’s first sentence. Did the city really stare out her office window? Here was a professor who didn’t want us teaching grammar to our students, yet she couldn’t even catch her own dangling modifier. Her co-​ writer and editor couldn’t either, for that matter. So, is it possible to write grammatically incorrect sentences and get published? Yes.Clearly, it is. But you should ask yourself what your goals are. If it’s to write lazy sentences for an academic journal, be my guest. If you want to write fiction with the hope of getting published by a major commercial publisher or a good-​ quality small press, you should probably care where a comma goes, not because the editor will reject you on the basis of a misplaced comma but because the craft of your work should imply, on every level, from point-​ of-​ view to the perfectly used semicolon, a writer who cares enough about the written word to know where to put a comma. (Imagine Melville beginning Moby-​ Dick, “Call me, Ishmael.” Who’s Ishmael, you’d wonder, and why does the narrator want Ishmael to call him?) Everyone makes mistakes. I’m always stunned whenever my copyedited manuscript is returned to me—a manuscript, I should note, that I’ve read over dozens of times—and the copyeditor has found grammar and spelling errors. I’m grateful to the copyeditor, of course. I’m also embarrassed that I hadn’t caught the errors. Everyone I know who’s published a book is guiltyof letting errors slip by.Worse is when an error gets past everyone and ends up in the finished book. But here’s the distinction I want to make. An editor can tell the difference , almost immediately, between the writer who cares about language and the writer who doesn’t care. So, quit bellyaching, and eat your peas, dammit! ...