Essential writing skills: grammar – the writer’s playground
Getting grammar right is not easy. Someone always has a different viewpoint. A new reader for my manuscript told me I needed the word “would”. I had left it out because it was a person talking. Yes, it would have been correct to use, but all of us do not speak perfect English. I left it out and sent her an explanation. She’s had terrific input and I’d hate to lose her as a reader.
It was Winston Churchill, I believe, who once insisted that ending a sentence with a preposition was something up with which he would not put.
As any of us who have dragged through High School English know, grammar is often touted as the basic building block of writing. Which, in many ways, it is; you can’t write things that scan properly without it. It’s there for a reason.
The onus is on authors to get it right, though that doesn’t mean losing perspective. Grammar is a tool, not an end-goal. The so-called ‘grammar Nazis’ who nit-pick authors for any technical glitch that they can attribute to the writing don’t achieve much other than showing themselves up as small-minded.
It happens though. Some years ago a book reviewer – not someone writing the reader commentaries one gets on Amazon, but a journalist commissioned to prepare a discursive article about one of my…
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