I have what many in the writing community would consider a dirty secret. And that secret is that I could no sooner diagram a sentence for you than I could grow wings and fly.
I've written before that my family moved between school systems frequently when I was growing up. My two and a half years at Sterling High School were the longest I ever went to a single school (even counting college).
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that this movement between schools came with a few advantages:
When I was getting bullied in the 2nd grade, moving to another school in the district meant a reprieve from a group of girls who'd beat me up in the bathroom.
In the 3rd grade, it meant getting away from the little boy who'd put a piece of paper in my left ear during "Heads Up, Seven Up," an action which left me with mild permanent hearing loss on that side.
In the 4th grade, moving allowed me to attend a school where they addressed my deficiencies in math by putting me in remedial math. Without that help, I doubt I would have passed math in grade school or junior high.
The disadvantages of that many moves far exceed those advantages:
It was impossible for someone as shy as I was to make friends. When you're shy, you need time to come out of your shell around people. I never got that time.
For the first half of the year, my teachers didn't know how my mother treated me. Then we'd have a parent-teacher conference, they'd watch her yell at me for even the most innocuous feedback they'd provided, and they'd spend the rest of the year trying to prop up my faltering self-esteem.
Every school followed a different curriculum schedule, which made keeping up with my classmates a Sisyphean task.
It's this last point which has had the biggest effect on my life, even beyond academics.
Math was impossible to learn by mimicry. I could not look at a math book and pick up the proper way to solve a problem without a lot of assistance from the teacher. (Sometimes, actually almost always, I couldn't understand it even with assistance from the teacher.)
While math was a struggle for me, once I learned to read, English classes went surprisingly well... mainly because with all the moving between schools, I usually missed grammar lessons.
One of my favorite shows is "30 Rock," and there's a quote from an episode in season 1 that I always remember when someone asks me how I'm doing.
Tracy: So, how you doing over there, Theo Huxtable?
Toofer: I'm doing good.
Tracy: Nah-uh. Superman does good; you're doing well. You need to study your grammar, son.
Writing essays or short stories for English class was my favorite part of school. Thanks to my love of reading, I was never the student who got straight A's in class, but I always passed. Usually with a comment from the teacher that I needed to "apply myself" to the material, and a lot of red ink on every paper I turned in, but a pass is still a pass.
While it's easy to pick up most of the grammar rules you need to know by reading, it's hard to learn and apply them all. The grammar checkers on Microsoft Word do a lot of work making me seem more competent with grammar than I am.
For example, comma usage rules elude me. I either over or under use them, often in an inconsistent way in the same document. I do love the Oxford comma, but anything beyond that usage is a mystery to me. I tend to write in what I call a "legato" style, so using commas well is important.
A popular thing I've noticed among my fellow writers is a passion for the em dash (—) or en dash (–) rather than a hyphen (-). I couldn't tell you which was which or when to use them if you held a million dollars over a volcano and told me I had to answer before you tossed it in. If it weren't for Merriam Websters' grammar page , I couldn't even tell that there was a difference.
Don't even get me started on the proper use of the apostrophe. I cannot remember when to use the 's vs s' vs not using one at all no matter how much I want to do so.
The vast majority of the time, I can get by with my basic understanding of grammar rules without anyone being the wiser. Truthfully, beyond English teachers lawyers, and pendants, most people simply don't care enough about grammar rules after school to worry about whether you've used them correctly or not.
But another group of people who care an awful lot about grammar usage? Everyone involved in the writing community. My fellow authors, agents I query, and (hopefully) future editors all care a great deal about proper grammar usage.
One of the main points of feedback I got on my manuscript from the last query was that I was making inconsistent mistakes with regard to comma usage. It was an embarrassing bit of feedback but not unexpected. I've received similar feedback on my writing before.
I should study grammar intensely. I know that with all the resources available on the web, there really isn't an excuse for me not to do so. Except when I do, the rules seem to fall right out of my head. There's a mental block there that I can't seem to get past.
I'm sure that I'm not the only writer out there hiding this dirty secret. There are others who had similar upbringings to mine, who never had a chance to learn the proper rules when their minds were young and plastic.
Maybe one day we'll start a club (and use Microsoft Grammar to fix our mistakes on the sign). Until then, I'll struggle-bus alone... and probably buy a subscription to Grammarly to hide my errors from the world.
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