This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!
Frankly my Dear –
Some people make a great fuss about Grammar, in short, they are pedants!
Those of us who write, or speak, in English, know that we can understand the language as it is spoken, no matter how “badly”, with words strung together in almost any old order. Not like the Germans who literally fall over and can’t understand you if you don’t put the verb at the end of the sentence ( I may be exaggerating slightly for comic effect) and what is with all those portmanteau words a sentence long? The French are not much better, they pretend they don’t understand you because of your atrocious accent and despise you even more if you don’t attempt to show yourself up – of course, they may just be (understandably) miffed because French used to be the official international language unit English superceded it because, I believe of the ease with which you can learn it to the point of being understood. Why am I talking about speech when the subject of this blog is grammar? Well there is much the same ease of communication in written “English” as with speech – that is, it is easy to get to the point of being understood, being perfectly correct in speech or written English is another matter altogether. We have rules of grammar so arcane that they make putting the verb at the end of the sentence look like child’s play. But here is the point, if you can make yourself understood, even speaking or writing in a patois, then that is the most important thing.
There is another reason I have talked about speech in a piece on grammar, and that is because, when I am writing, especially in a blog, which to my mind should sound, inside the reader’s head, as if you are talking to them, then grammar is there to help the reader to achieve that feat. Nowadays I use Grammarly, an app which is far more than a spell-checker, it spots extra spaces, offers fairly basic grammar suggestions and even assesses the tone of your writing, mine comes out, disappointingly, as “Formal” given that I strive for relative informality…
I am sure you will be glad that this is not the sort of blog where the writer offers compendious coverage of their chosen topic – the internet is there for that sort of thing if you really want the nitty-gritty of grammar but I hope you understand why I began with the quote “Frankly my Dear – I don’t give a damn…” If I can understand and be understood, I will not judge and I hope will not be judged on some pedantic point of grammatical correctness.
I will, however, talk briefly about three things which I use a great deal, which the grammar police would probably disapprove of. Firstly, as in the “Gone with the Wind” quotation above I often use a hyphen rather than a comma when I want to indicate a slightly longer rpause than I feel a coma suggests. Likewise, at the end of the quotation, I have put there dots, the proper name of which is, an ellipsis and the proper definition of which is “the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.” Now I think you can see what I mean about obscure rules… What I mean when I finish a sentence with three dots, is that I want to leave the sentence idea hanging in the air and not terminated by the finality of a full stop.
Lastly, I want to mention the Oxford comma. This is the sort of rule that divides even the pedants of English grammar… In brief, I was taught at the age of seven or eight, and I actually remember the very lesson – that you should NEVER put a comma before an and. Now the strange thing, is that I grew up in, and received this lesson in Oxford, and though I have been using the Oxford comma, the breaking of this rule for a long time. I use it because it reads better as if spoken. An example is the comma after the word Oxford (first instance) in the preceding sentence. In the following sentence you would not use the Oxford comma ” My favourite puddings in order are Bread and Butter Pudding, Apple Crumble, Peaches and Cream.” But in this sentence you would – “The ingredients required are Flour, Sugar, Peaches, and Cream”. Makes it read right…
So there it is, ignore the rules as long as you are understood and to my mind, what makes writing sound like speech is what works best…
I Don’t Give a Damn…