Looks as if many people are interested in the wonderfully time-saving and ink-saving solution represented by using “they” to refer to singular antecedents. Baron discusses some of the more complex implications as this rather time-honored practice is enlisted to address new challenges inherent in producing precise, inclusive language. The WOL doesn’t have a reblog button (and be aware, when I try to sign in to comment using Facebook or Google, I get an error message and so end up using my gmail account). But the blog is worth a look. The article on “they” is here.
Category Archives: Myths and Truths for writers
Which Grammar Rules Do You Ignore?
As I noted a few posts ago, in his article “The Phenomenology of Error,” Joseph Williams categorized errors by type. Among his more interesting categories, in my view, were those errors that the experts make even as telling us not to (and nobody notices). He also had a category of grammatically correct constructions that sound so odd when we use them that we generally prefer the error.
These categories change with time, since language and usage do, of course. But his discussion of them made me think about the kinds of errors we can and maybe should ignore and, in fact, the kinds of rules we should ignore.
Here are three of my “rules I can ignore” (if I want to). Do you agree with me on these? What are yours?
The “that/which” distinction.
Okay, I don’t ignore it, but from what I’ve seen, a whole lot of people do. It’s the one Jacques Barzun didn’t catch himself ignoring, as Williams documents. It depends on knowing the difference between a restrictive and nonrestrictive (or an essential versus nonessential) adjective clause (which you can read about here), and yes, I’m using “which” correctly here:
The house, which had just been painted and re-roofed, sat on a cozy cul-de-sac. (Nice info but you could lift if out and not miss it.)
The house that had the new paint and new roof was the best deal of the three. (Allows you to distinguish the best deal from the others; take it out and see how much is lost.)
The point is, only a very few termagants (like me) would even notice if you replaced the “that” in the second sentence with “which.”
The “whom” challenge.
I call this a challenge because the error is a lot less noticeable when people commit it than when they try to get it right and get it wrong. Simply speaking, only the above referenced termagant will rage if you just use ‘who” ninety-nine percent of the time.
After all, doesn’t it sound more natural to say, “Who did you give that to?” than “Whom did you give that to?” The “whom” in the second is correct because it’s the object of the preposition “to” and objects have to be in the objective case (like “him,” “her,” “us,” and “me”). But our minds these days just aren’t trained to worry about all such distinctions.
A sign of our downfall? Actually, putting that “m” on “who” is an “inflection,” and English has been discarding inflections when they don’t really add any information for centuries.
Actually, the only time most people will want the “whom” form is when it directly follows its preposition, and that usually happens in a question that’s been re-ordered: “To whom did you give it?” “With whom were you going?” “For whom did you buy that hat?” Do you have to write these particular sentences? In my view, not unless you feel compelled.
The problem arises when people assume that because “whom” sounds so much more formal, it is compelled whenever one wants to sound formal. So I’ve actually encountered sentences like “Whom is going with us?” Ouch, that really grates.
The messier—and understandably more confusing—situation occurs when the who/whom pair has to be sorted out at the beginning of a dependent clause acting as an object. The handbook rule is that you choose “who” or “whom” depending on what it’s doing in its own clause, not in the larger sentence.
“Did you say who is going with us?” (correct) and “Did you say whom the hat is for?” (again correct–note that little preposition “for” controlling the choice). But “hypercorrectness”—going gaga over sounding upmarket—leads to “Did you say whom is going with us?” As a sort of sub-termagant, I submit that more than a few of the erudite people writers hope to impress WILL notice that one (though I’m willing to be corrected).
In my view, you should go ahead and make the “mistake” of the perfectly natural-sounding “Did you say who the hat is for?” and just kick “whom” out of your vocabulary rather than sticking it where it doesn’t belong (here’s a wise soul who agrees!).
Singular “they.”
This one is a lost cause. It’s been a lost cause, according to Dennis Baron of the Web of Language, just about forever. English simply has no singular, gender-neutral pronoun—except “it,” of course; just try choosing “it” in this sentence: “Everybody should bring his/her/its lunch to the meeting.”
The conundrum, of course, is that “everybody” wants so badly to be singular; we say “everybody is,” not “everybody are.” Certain people who shall not be named think there’s really no problem. Just pick “his,” and who’ll care? After all, everybody is a “he,” n’est-ce pas?
For quite a while, “he” and “his” were the preferred options among those who got to do the published writing. Because more kinds of people get to do published writing now, the masculine singular won’t do. As Baron points out, efforts to creatively solve this problem of a singular “antecedent” with no acceptable gender-neutral singular pronoun have gone nowhere.
And “his or her” (or “her or his”), the only option that is even remotely close to acceptable, gets old in a hurry (“Everybody should open his or her notebook and take out his or her homework. . . .”). Baron writes that Vanderbilt University has actually declared singular “they” perfectly acceptable in its formal documents. So ignore this baby at will.
Those are a few of the rules I think we should ignore a) because people notice them less and less and often never; and b) trying to follow them results in sentences that will offend even people with certified tin ears.
So what are your rules to ignore?
How Much Grammar Do You Need? Part IV
Here are some “grammar” rules you DON’T need!
That is, rules that aren’t even really rules. And even if they were rules, they’d fall into that category Joe Williams created of “rules” that are more noticeable and disruptive when they are followed than when they aren’t, because they’re alien to the way most of speak and write.
Of course, if you could see into the innermost grammar hearts of all those agents and editors to whom you direct your missives, you would find people who cringe every time you fail to observe one of these mythological rules. My point is that convoluting your prose to avoid them, or obsessing over them to the point that your creativity begins to ice over, is counterproductive. In these cases, let your natural ear as an English speaker rule.
Here they are (I’ll probably come up with others and invite you to submit your candidates):
Beginning a sentence with “because.”
Williams says that there’s no sign of this prohibition in any handbook he ever saw, and I echo that. Yet, even thirty years after Williams debunked it, my students would still cite this “rule” to each other in their peer reviews.
In my view—a pure hypothesis, I admit—this instruction arose from some teacher’s worry that clauses prefaced with “because” all too often were never connected to the necessary independent clause and thus end up as fragments. We do talk this way: “Because I said so.” “Because I don’t want to.” “Because I like it.”
It’s a fact that the minute you put the word “because” in front of a sentence, it becomes “dependent,” in need of a crutch to make sense. In conversation, the missing information is already present in the ongoing conversation. In formal Standard Written English, the missing components should be supplied in an independent clause attached to the “because clause.” “Because I like it, I often swim in the lake in winter.” (Or because I’m a glutton for punishment.)
It’s probably more natural to reverse the clauses: “I often swim in the lake in the winter because. . . .” But there’s nothing grammatically wrong with starting with the “because clause.” It’s a stylistic choice, not a grammar/moral-fiber choice.
Ending a sentence with a preposition.
I was startled years ago when, at my university, the speech communication people presented the writing faculty with a list of the things students ought to be learning in first-year writing, and the list was just a bunch of grammar “rules,” this one prominently among them. Honestly, I thought anyone teaching writing in college would have a more nuanced idea of what “writing” consists of than that list.
In order to follow this supposed rule, you have to become so rigidly formal that your efforts wave and shout from the page. “Who were you talking to?” becomes “To whom were you talking?” Or say you’re synopsizing in a query and you need a sentence like, “His daughter was the only person he’d confessed to.” Is it really better to write, “His daughter was the only person to whom he’d confessed”? It depends entirely on how “formal” you want to sound. Personally, I’d probably find a way to “write around” this conundrum, but I’m making a point. (We’ll get to the who/whom issue soon enough.)
There’s a very famous example of the preposition-at-the-end issue often attributed to Winston Churchill. Supposedly he responded to an editor’s efforts to eliminate terminal prepositions with a note: “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” (My dad loved to quote this at me.) For a lively discussion of this supposed quote, see this post by Geoffrey K. Pullum at The Language Log. This post claims, from a reputable source, that the rule that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition “was apparently created ex nihilo in 1672 by the essayist John Dryden.” The post gives several other examples of smart choices in which the preposition stays where it wants to, including a discussion of the kind of English verb that includes words generally defined as prepositions, such as “put up with.” Separate these at your peril.
Splitting infinitives
I’m old enough to remember expletives fired at the epithet for Star Trek as it shifted into warp speed: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Eeek! Split infinitive—separating the “to” from its partner, “go,” which together create the “infinitive” form of the verb, which in English is created exactly this way: a main form of the verb plus “to.” To eat. To see. To write. If you’ve ever taken a foreign language, say Spanish or French, you also learned about infinitives, the more-or-less “base” form of the verb: estar, hablar, manger, sortir.
You’ll note that these infinitives belonging to “romance languages” (not because they’re sexy but because they come from “Roman” or Latin ancestors) are one-word infinitives, not two-word infinitives as in English. At some point, some upmarket grammarians decided that Latin was a more “advanced” or “noble” language than English; English needed to be elevated by becoming more like Latin. You can’t split an infinitive in Latin, for obvious reasons; so you shouldn’t split one in English either. I guess you’ve noticed how much better English sounds as a result of this rule.
Or does it? Does “To go boldly where no man has gone before” really sound better? Not to my ear. One of the reasons the revised version clunks is that the original, “to boldly go,” is in “iambic pentameter,” the poetic meter most natural to English—in fact, the one used by Shakespeare. Here’s a nice account of the rule and advice about (not) applying it.
The upshot: listen to your sentences. Put the adverb (the “boldly”) and the preposition where they most want to go.
Send me your candidates: Rules we don’t need!
Filed under correct grammar for writers of fiction, Editing your novel, Finding literary agents for writers, grammar rules for writers, Learning to write, Myths and Truths for writers, punctuation for writers of novels, self editing for fiction writers, style for writers, Teaching writing, Writing, Writing and teaching writing
Why Writers MUST Read
A wonderful perk of being retired from teaching is rediscovering what it’s like to read fiction for pleasure. I assume I don’t have to convince any writers of the pleasures of a good book!
But my new reading experience has reminded me why writers MUST read. True, we know we have to read in our own genres. After all, we have to be able to tell agents and editors we query how our own work fits into a landscape with which we had better be intimately familiar. But we need to read—we MUST read—more widely than that.
We need to know, we must know, what works for people who are not us. In my lifetime of reading fiction, slowed but not terminated by my years of teaching, I have always been surprised to discover what other people consider good. I hope I’m not the only reader to roll my eyes once in a while and wonder, “Who’d’a thunk anyone would publish that?”
But “that” turns out to have five-star reviews on Amazon, enormous followings on Goodreads, and thousands of Facebook likes. I’ve moved from “I’d never do that!” to “What can I learn from this?” For example, from watching how different kinds of writers win over readers, I learned the importance of the “pet-the-dog” scene. The protagonist you want your readers to stick with has to do one small “good” thing somewhere, somehow, in the book’s opening moments. Related: the “stop-being-mean-to-her” scene, wherein your protagonist is being treated unjustly. I didn’t learn about these strategies from reading Shakespeare—although I assure you, he does them, too.
In other words, there’s some reason a lot of people like the books you hate. There’s gold in figuring out what that reason is.
We need to know, we must know, that the kinds of books we love do exist, sometimes in the most unexpected places. I read so much about the fall of publishing, about the sheer inability of those of us who might once have been indulgently called “midlist” authors to persevere. I hear so often that unless you’re already a celebrity or a world-renowned expert, you only have two options for your quiet, literary, sort-of-mystery-but-sort-of-not: either self-publish it or stick it in the drawer.
Yet over and over I take a chance on a new book only to discover wonderful writing still bubbling up out there. I don’t say it necessarily gets shelved face-out at Barnes & Noble or makes it to the top at Amazon. I’m reading a terrific book right now that will probably never do either (Mary O’Dell’s Cyn, from Turquoise Morning Press). But good writing gets noticed, and it gets published. And I get to read it by opening myself to that chance.
More to the point, I get the reassurance that continuing to grow as a writer is worth the effort. I can’t write as well as the great writers I admire, but I can learn to write better than I do now, and it’s because I find these great writers out there through reading that I have the faith to soldier on.
We learn what we forgot to do in our own books. This is a little different from the strategies in point one above; it’s not about devices, it’s about fundamentals. Writing every day, deep in a story, we get into habits and patterns that, in my case at least, lull me so that I forget something vital I should be attending to, something I’ve left out. Often it’s something that doesn’t come naturally to me, that I need to work at. For example, the other day I went to our local bookseller (Carmichael’s) to redeem a gift card. The book I wanted, Ben H. Winter’s World of Trouble, was out of stock, but I did find a discounted copy of The Girl on the Train.
I expected some sort of mystery/thriller, not too far from my genre. I expected one of those bang-up openings that set me on the edge of a cliff, teetering. Instead, I found myself in a tranquil, slow-moving country, listening in on the placid observations of a muted soul.
I thought of all my anguish trying to make my opening pages electric. Here I was holding a bestseller whose author saw no such need. Then, slowly, I began to understand what she was doing—something I struggle to do enough.
This was/is a classic, masterly demonstration of that single overriding rule for all writers of fiction: show, don’t tell.
From what this character noticed and how she reacted to what she noticed, she slowly let me build for myself a rich, nuanced sense of a soul in deep trouble, a world alight with danger, if not the guns-and-daggers kind (not yet, at least). A soul in trouble, a soul in danger: the classic “it” that a story either has or doesn’t. And all without ever shaking a finger at me to tell me what I was supposed to see or know.
That night, I got out my notebook. Above one column, I wrote, “What I want readers to know about Sarah.” Above the next column, I wrote, “What she does to show it.” I sat for an hour, working my way out of that all-too-available strategy of having Sarah tell readers how she was feeling, what she feared, worried about. What does Sarah do to let readers sense her danger, understand how she got here, so that they’ll be shouting at her, “No, no, don’t do that! Do this!” and sweating (I hope) to see if she does.
It’s not that I didn’t know this basic rule. But inside the walls of my own imagination, I had lost sight of it. I didn’t even miss it, until I wandered out into other landscapes and saw another writer doing it—when I picked up that book and read.
I Continue to Learn about Publishing. . . .
Following up on the rather alarming article by Dean Wesley Smith that one of my earlier posts linked to, I wrote to some agents and publishing experts requesting their thoughts. 
Despite dealing with a family emergency, Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware took the time to write back with a compelling clarification of Smith’s more extreme claims. With her permission, I reproduce her reply here. You’ll note a link to a very thorough article on the issue of reversion-of-rights clauses in contracts. If you’re on the verge of querying or have an offer, this article is well worth your time.
Here is Victoria’s reply to my questions:
Taking your questions in order:
1) Is it true that “life-of-copyright” is now the industry standard,
so that rights never revert, regardless of the original publisher’s
intentions for the book?Life of copyright has _always_ been the industry standard among large and medium-size publishers. This is nothing new, and I’m bemused that Dean Wesley Smith would say that it is.
I do think that a limited-term contract is far more desirable, if you’re going with a small press (and small presses do often offer limited-term contracts–though life-of-copyright is not at all uncommon in the small press world). But life of copyright doesn’t have to be a problem–as long as there’s a detailed, specific reversion clause that ties rights reversion to minimum sales (for instance, making rights reversion automatic on author request once sales drop below 100 copies in any 12-month period). I’ve written about this in detail here: http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2012/04/importance-of-reversion-clauses-in-book.html .
Unfortunately, it’s not unusual to encounter life of copyright contracts that _don’t_ have adequate reversion clauses–especially in the small press world, where people often don’t know what they’re doing. You may be able to negotiate to add a good reversion clause–my agent has negotiated sales-dependent reversion clauses into all my contracts since at least the early 2000’s–but, depending on the publisher, you may also choose to walk away from a life of copyright contract offer with inadequate reversion provisions. It’s definitely something to watch out for. But the reality is a lot more nuanced than what’s presented in Dean Wesley Smith’s post.
2) Is it true that authors who were once seen as “midlist” should
now assume they will most likely be offered $5000 or less as an
advance? (I received that amount for my first novel, but much more
for subsequent submissions that definitely did not quality as
“best-sellers,” though they sold respectably.)Advances have generally fallen, especially since the 2008 economic downturn. But they are all over the map, so it’s impossible to make a blanket declaration. Advance amounts depend on all kinds of factors, including your agent (or if you have one; authors without agents tend to get lower advances), the publisher (smaller publishers generally offer smaller advances), what the publisher’s expectations of your books are–and, unfortunately, if you have a publishing track record, the sales of your previous books. In any case, if your sales are good, you’ll get the money owed to you regardless of the advance amount.
As for the whole “midlist” thing (that word doesn’t mean what it used to)–a lot has changed in the publishing world over the past 15 to 20 years, and one of the things that’s changed most is how hard it is to stay in the game. I don’t think it’s any more difficult to break into traditional publishing than it ever was (possibly easier, given the huge volume of books that are being published), but it is a lot more difficult to maintain a career, especially if your sales aren’t stellar.
3) the proliferation of “royalty only” publishers. How are such
entities regarded in the industry at present? Is this a coming wave?This really is a phenomenon only in the small press world, which has expanded hugely over the past 15 or so years thanks to digital technology. These days, anyone can set up a publishing company just by registering with CreateSpace or LightningSpark. One of the ways many small presses try to limit their financial outlay is to eliminate advances. This is extremely common, and has been for some time. However, don’t believe anyone who tells you that advances are becoming less common among large and medium-sized publishers, or that debut authors no longer receive advances. This simply isn’t true.
There are some great small presses, but an awful lot of amateur and predatory ones whose staff know little about editing, production, design, and marketing. When Writer Beware was founded in 1998, we mostly got complaints about literary agents and scam vanity publishers; these days, small press problems make up by far the biggest volume of complaints we receive. In many cases, self-publishing is preferable.
– Victoria
Five Questions Indie Authors Should Ask Agents
A couple of posts ago I linked to an article that took me to this post from Dean Wesley Smith, in which he informed us that the current industry standard in traditional publishing is “life-of-copyright,” which basically means that we will never regain the rights to our work, regardless of the publisher’s intentions for our books, and that the most we can expect in the way of advances is $5000 or so.
I’ve posted questions about these claims to a couple of active blogs on the business of writing, including to an agent’s blog, and will be posting to others. In my searches, I came across this post about how indie authors should expect agents to protect their rights, which is directly relevant to these issues.
This appeared on the web site of the Alliance of Independent Authors. I’m following their blog and will share interesting information.
How Much “Grammar” Do You Need? Part III . . . .
I’m picking up on my last post, in which I discussed Joe Williams’s “Phenomenology of Error,” published in College Composition and Communication in 1982, where he ably demonstrates that even the most erudite language mavens only find errors when they are explicitly looking for them, and thus miss bunches, even in their own work.
Williams developed his own rather complicated categories of errors. Of course, he’s an academic writing for other academics, and the essay is more than 30 years old, so his examples may not be the ones we’d pick today if we wanted to duplicate his categories.
But a couple are.
Briefly, his categories are
- Rules we notice and respond to with a shriek when they’re violated. (“Shriek” is my word, equivalent to the reactions from experts Williams notes in his introduction, people who label such things as “OK,” “hopefully,” and “He invited Mary and myself to dinner” as examples of an “atrocity,” a “detestable vulgarity,” and “garbage.”) In this category of noticeable rules, Williams places basic violations of Standard English structure, such as “I seen” and “He don’t.” Note that these locutions don’t impede understanding. They’re perfectly clear, and perfectly acceptable in many contexts. (In some dialects, such as Black English, ways of talking that violate Standard English are actually rules of that dialect, with their own influence over such matters as time and continuity of action. See the resources here and here to understand this point better.)
- Rules we really don’t notice even when they’re violated—despite knowing that the rule exists. Williams specifically offers the that/which distinction, which (see, I used it right) even such eminences as Jacques Barzun cheerfully violated within a page of telling us not to. Later I’ll have a little to say about this rule, since it falls clearly into one of my own categories.
- Rules we notice when they’re observed because they call attention to themselves, a small class. His example is “It is I,” which is indeed “correct” but which jumps off the page at most people. I suspect that “between you and me” is rapidly becoming such a conspicuous instance of correctness (yes, it is correct) for many. I actually heard someone say “between he and I” this morning on a news show. Looks as if the subjective case after a preposition is coming into its own.
- Rules that, when violated, actually elicit a favorable reaction from individuals. Williams offers an example of a rule he actually prefers to see broken: using “than” rather than “from” after “differently” when what follows is a clause and not a noun. I think there are more rules like this, rules that, if broken, improve prose. I’ve already pointed out one possible candidate: choosing to start a sentence with “but” (assuming you think this violates an actual rule). I’ll propose more soon.
This is possibly the best place to remember that languages change. Effort like those the French have made to freeze the language are flung down and stomped on on every street corner, in every hostel. All you have to do is read something written in the 1700s—oh, say, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal“—to appreciate how punctuation, spelling, and diction have shifted since then. Students required to read such texts complain mightily about how badly written they are. English is, as we speak, in the process of losing the apostrophe (a vagrant and an intruder to start with).
I actually regret this loss; I’ll horrify my college-writing colleagues by siding just a little with Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, agreeing with her that it might sometimes be helpful to know how many people we’re talking about in a sentence like “The travelers bags will fit in the overhead bins.” A simple apostrophe would tell you, and this Wikipedia article gives more examples of useful clarifications an apostrophe can make. But I am not going to emulate the folly of the French.
I’m approaching the task of establishing my own categories of errors. My main concern is to keep things reasonably simple, and not to get tangled up trying to explain things handbooks or sites like the Purdue Owl explain pretty well. I’ll set up the categories here, and then clarify and defend them in upcoming posts:
- Rules you really don’t need to worry about
- Rules you absolutely must obey
- Rules that are actually judgment calls. Breaking one of these rules (like starting a sentence with “but”) is a gamble. If you absolutely hate what following the rule does to your prose—well, you pays your money and you takes your chance.
I’m venturing into self-publishing …
I’m venturing into self-publishing ….
From brittneysahin, who reposted it from Nicola Prentis. When you click through Brittney’s site to the full piece (Prentis), BE SURE to follow her link to the Dean Wesley Smith argument for self-publishing over traditional publishing. I’m really rethinking all this. I think we get caught up in the fantasy of that six-figure advance, when the reality is going to be much different. And just having retrieved the rights to my earlier novels from Bantam, I’m appalled at the “Life-of-Copyright” language that Smith says is now standard in contracts. If so, that’s a deal breaker, and it should be for us all.
How Much “Grammar” Do You Need? Part II
In which I continue to make my case that we may not need as much as we think:
In 1982, the late Joseph M. Williams, then a professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Chicago and author of the book Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, played a trick on his academic colleagues in English. In an article in a major journal for writing teachers, he challenged the idea that there were sacred grammar rules that every educated person recognized and blasted when they turned up in other people’s writing.
His argument had several parts:
- There are several categories of “error”: the ones educated English speakers definitely would recognize and avoid, but also those that even the most well-trained among us read right over—even in our own writing!
- Whether you are likely to see errors that you and other people make depends on why you’re reading: If you’re specifically looking for mistakes, as teachers tend to do when reading student papers, you see them, but if you’re reading for content, you gloss right over them.
- Most of us are all too likely to accept something as a rule because some supposed authority said so, not because the rule actually matters in communication—or even makes sense!
- And many supposed rules DON’T make any difference in communication, which is why we read right past them (and I just made one of those errors in this sentence).
To support his claims, Williams looked at rules from many of the “language mavens” of the time, including some revered experts like E. B. White of Strunk & White fame, William Zinsser, author of the perennial classic On Writing Well, and George Orwell, whose essay, “Politics and the English Language,” has been a staple of many an English classroom since it was published in 1946. In each case, Williams shows that these authors broke their own stated rules with apparent abandon.
Particularly delicious is his takedown of Orwell’s rule that we should avoid the passive voice. As Williams illustrates, “Orwell, in the very act of criticising [sic] the passive, not only casts his proscription against it in the passive, but almost all the sentences around it, as well.” What’s interesting to him, Williams says, is not that Orwell made this egregious stylistic “mistake.” What’s interesting is that he and his editors never noticed it! Nor have the legions of English teachers who’ve praised Orwell as an example of good writing for eons. None of these experts have ever noticed that he was wallowing in the very slough of error he told us to avoid. (I just inserted another one of those mistakes that I would argue we tend to read right past.)
At the end of his article, Williams challenges his readers: In the article, he says, he’s made more than 100 of the kinds of “errors” his colleagues swear they would never commit and never tolerate. How many, he demands to know, did you spot on first reading (no cheating, going back and doing an error hunt)? He filed a marked-up copy with a respected college-writing professional to document that he really played this trick.
His point again: to document that many things we think are wrong are only visible if we’re actively looking for them.
Where does that leave us lowly query writers? Just possibly, our readers (agents and editors) are reading for mistakes. After all, with thousands of queries to slog through, an error is a good excuse to move on to the next letter in the stack.
I agree: Agents and editors reading queries and pages are likely to be much more sensitive to error than many of us are in our casual reading. But here’s the rub: we can’t possibly know which errors he or she will recognize, let alone which ones are likely to kill the deal.
For example:
- How many passive-voice constructions am I allowed? One? Three? None? Or is she like the woman who once critiqued some pages for me at a conference. She told me to stop using the passive voice so much. Turns out she meant I was overusing the past progressive. (She was right, however, that I was relying on the past progressive too much —as just now?).
- Or does he care about the difference between “that” and “which”?
- Or what is her stance on “hopefully”? On split infinitives? On ending sentences with prepositions?
- Does he want me to say “Everyone ate his or her lunch,” or is he okay with “their”?
Sometimes we just have to make tough judgment calls. I started a sentence with “but” a few lines back. Is she the kind of editor for whom that is forbidden? But what if that capitalized “but” works beautifully to illustrate the contrast and transition I want to make visible? Should I edit my prose to follow a rule that I may not even think is valid, or should I take a chance?
I agree with Williams that there are different levels of error. In the next post I’ll share his categorizations and begin making the case for my own.
In the meantime—ain’t this fun?
How Much “Grammar” Do You Really Need?
Put Your Editing Nightmares to Bed!
Across the online landscape for writers, there’s a lot of anxiety about producing that error-free query, synopsis, or draft. With reason—the first letter in “professional” is “p” for “perfect.” There’s no wiggle room on this one, is there? It’s got to be capital-R Right.
As someone who taught college writing for 25 years and as a published novelist, I’ve been on the front lines of the effort to spread “good grammar.” The fact is, the whole question of what’s Right is more complicated than you think.
In the next few posts, I’m going to make an argument that we don’t need to obsess quite as much as we do. In fact, there are some “grammar rules” we can even trash!
Yes, You Have to be Able to Edit Your Work. . . .
I’m not for one minute telling you that your command of English syntax and usage is not important. It’s vital. But writers can all too easily get bogged down on trivia and even on myths (“OMG! I ended a sentence with a preposition! :-0”). One common cause of writer’s block is thinking that every comma is radioactive, ready to explode and destroy the known universe if mishandled. So for us writers, a little bit of a reality check is a good thing!
Today’s topic: What is good grammar? Answer: Depends on whom you ask.
(Yep, whom you ask. Why? Because it’s the object of the verb “ask.” Eeek! Relax. Nine times out of ten, “who” would be just fine in that line. Hang around; later I’ll explain why.)
Linguists, people who study how languages work, generally agree on three things: Continue reading
Filed under College writing, correct grammar for writers of fiction, Finding literary agents for writers, grammar rules for writers, Learning to write, looking for literary editors and publishers, Myths and Truths for writers, punctuation for writers of novels, self editing for fiction writers, style for writers, Working with literary editors
Just Can't Help Writing 