Just You Wait ‘Enry ‘Iggins
One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a grammatically correct sentence and they can’t spell.
Most of the grammatical and spelling mistakes you see in people’s manuscripts are old chestnuts. They don’t know how to punctuate (especially when it comes to apostrophes,) they mix up the spellings of homophones (their, there, they’re, for example, or your and you’re,) they misspell uncommon words, they use inappropriate words, they blindly repeat common errors (like using ‘epicentre’ when they mean ‘centre’,) they don’t understand how to form plurals (especially frequently malformed ones like ‘medium’ vs ‘media’,) and they write as they speak (using ‘then’ instead of ‘than’ for example, as in, “He was bigger then his father.”)
What people who can’t spell and who don’t understand grammar fail to appreciate is that, for people who can and do, each little mistake they encounter provokes an almost physical pain. Editors and agents faced with a page full of mistakes like this will save themselves the agony of reading the whole manuscript by rejecting it as swiftly as they can.
To lack such simple skills when you aspire to publication is therefore quite an impediment, and astonishing, too, when the causes and the remedies are staring us in the face. I believe that the root of the problem is that people do not read enough well-written books, that they do not pay enough attention to what they read, and that they do not acquire the habit of speaking well.
You don’t have to read the classics to find good, grammatically-correct writing, you can find it in most published fiction. But if you want to know what it looks like, go and read some Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Margaret Atwood, Gore Vidal, and Ray Bradbury. Then, at least, you’ll have a benchmark. You do have to read carefully though. You have to consider the sentences, the word-choices, the punctuation, the arrangement of words. And you do have to read enough of it that it starts seeping into your unconscious. If you love words, if you love reading, this will hardly be a chore.
And practice speaking too. I have never seen this mentioned as an aspect of good writing, but it seems clear to me that many of the mistakes people make in their writing come directly from the way they speak. I’m not suggesting that everyone who wants to write in English should speak ‘the Queen’s English’ but that they should, at the very least, speak English.
The grammatical mistakes people make in ordinary speech are more easily forgiven – and feel less jarring – than the same mistakes seen in print. We get away with a lot when we speak but we cannot expect to receive the same latitude when we write. If you speak sloppily, if your grammar is atrocious, if you misuse words and can’t form plurals, and you are unaware of it, it is not really surprising that your writing will reflect this. So listen to what you are saying. Think about what your words mean. What’s more, don’t just let other people’s words and sentences wash over you, or into you. Listen to them and analyse them. And don’t take it for granted that a newsreader or a journalist knows how to speak or write good English; a large proportion of them do not.
And as for bloggers… Well, let’s just say that the first draft of this piece contained numerous typos. I’ll also say that the final draft of my novel, TimeSplash, came back from the copy editor buried in such a thick encrustation of markup, it was hard to find the text. You did take that pinch of salt, didn’t you?
I always think that if you want to break the rules, that’s fine – as long as you know what they are and how they work. That way, when you break them you’ll know what you’re doing, and you can control the effect on your reader. I’m a big fan of the sentence fragment, myself. Especially in SF.
And amen to giving attention to how we speak. Aside from your very pertinent comments, Graham, I would say if you aren’t aware of your own verbal style it’s nigh impossible to write dialogue that sells character effectively. A story where the characters all sound the same will get boring pretty fast!
Both excellent points, Janette – and I wish I’d made them!
It’s all about control. Just as a sculptor must understand stone and tools and their own strength, a writer must understand language. Without this knowledge (among others) one cannot hope to get precisely the effect one strives to achieve.
As for sentence fragments, I’m a big fan of Robert Goddard but his excessive use of sentence fragments does sometimes drive me nuts.
Mr. Storrs:
I live in the western US. The people I grew up around, at my father’s country auction, often spoke “Cowboy”. The thicker their “Cowboy” accent, the harder it was to communicate with them sometimes, especially after I went away to college and returned home with better spoken grammar.
Let me explain my dilemma: I had to work in the office at my dad’s auction. Communication with his customers was profoundly important and our family’s income depended upon it. Therefore, I had to adapt.
I spoke proper English by night and “Cowboy” by day, slipping into our native dialect to build good customer relations. I know it sounds very closed-minded, but to my father’s auction customers–people who bought used furniture and boxes of old magazines for petty cash–my highfalutin English sounded condescending to them. It was bad for business.
So yes, it’s nice to have good grammar when communicating with world-wide English speakers on the Internet or in a published novel, but it isn’t always good for business at a local level. Spoken English must follow different rules than written English.
I hope you don’t mind hearing my opinion. I wanted to share my unique perspective.
Hi Mechelle, I’m absolutely delighted to have your opinion! And please call me Graham.
I was raised in a poor part of the North of England and my family speaks a broad Yorkhire dialect. (I’m sure you know the kind of thing: “There’s nowt so queer as folk,” “Ee up, love, you’ll never ger oop t’stairs in that clobber,” and so on.) I spoke like that too as a youngster. I still slip back into it when I go ‘home’.
When I went to university and moved away from the North, I gradually lost my accent and adopted that of the people around me – who were almost all from the South. Now my family deride me for my ‘posh’ accent.
I think perhaps it was having such a strong accent, and speaking a dialect other people found hard, or comical, that made me so aware of language when I was very young. It was pretty obvious that the people on the BBC, and the people who wrote the books I was reading, were speaking almost another language to the one I spoke at home. (In fact, it was a huge delight to me when I first read Wuthering Heights to find all the dialect in there I was so familiar with.)
I have no quarrel with anyone’s dialect or accent. I’m pretty sure that ‘Cowboy’ English is as good as anyone else’s. The important thing for a writer is to know how to communicate to their readership. I expect there are genres where writing in ‘Cowboy’ would not seem out of place
Yet my comments on a mastery of spelling and grammar would still hold even in ‘Cowboy’. I wouldn’t seem at all literate if I spoke ‘Cowboy’ yet couldn’t spell hi-phallootin, would I? 
I think different dialects add to the charm of a country and I’m proud of my own linguistic heritage. However, it seems to me that books for a wide audience really ought to be written in ‘standard English’ (either the UK or the American version – Australian English is so close to UK English that I won’t make a big thing about it here) so that most readers can read them without difficulty. Having said that, if the book is written in the first person, I think it is important to get the ‘voice’ of the narrator correct – and that might mean writing in dialect. Similarly, dialogue within the book should respect the speaker’s dialect.
There is a grey area that I’m still struggling with. I tend to write stories from multiple points of view – often changing POV with each scene (but not within scenes.) I also tend to write what is called ‘deep POV’ where we go deeply into the thoughts and feelings of the character whose POV we are experiencing. Unconscously at first, but now quite deliberately, each character’s deep POV means that I change the ‘voice’ I am using to match the character’s own voice. Hopefully, I do this subtly, changing the style and vocabulary of the narration just enough to make the reader feel they are with a different character. I’m not sure this is the best way to do it – it is certainly not every writer’s choice! – but I shall keep on experimenting.
Ooh Graham – TOTALLY agree with you on the ‘deep POV’ stuff! I’m currently doing a new work where I change POV and I’m having so much fun experimenting with the same thing.
So far I’m writing scenes from the points-of-view of a young woman who grew up on the ‘mean streets’ of a massive spacestation and a middle-aged man who runs a galactic-scale business with his grown children. They are VERY different!