My Grammarian Evolution
I found my first typo at age six. Interrupting my mother’s reading of The Gingerbread Man, I asked, “Isn’t that the end of the sentence? So where’s the dot?” The end of the titular cookie’s taunt had no period, just closing quotation marks. My mother blinked, looked at the page, and said, “I think you’re right.”
So began my love affair with the intricacies of punctuation, followed by an appreciation for grammar in general. My parents encouraged my sister and me to read constantly, upgrading our bookshelves from The Gingerbread Man to British and American literature. This continuous stream of written words helped me absorb grammatical rules of academic English, because something about the way my brain was wired just intrinsically accepted and memorized these rules. I admired authors who manipulated punctuation and syntax to get just the right reader experience of a topic. Typos and misspellings acted like mental speedbumps, jolting me out of the rhythm of the text.
My literary childhood made writing easy in high school, where I was my friends’ first choice of editor when we were all finishing up our English lit papers. Becoming the copy editor of our sort-of-bimonthly student newspaper seemed like a natural step. But as it turned out, the Associated Press and I differed on what we considered “correct” – namely, the Oxford or serial comma.
I adored this comma. I still do. I thought it was clearly superior to leaving lists up to any kind of interpretation or potential confusion. But the AP Stylebook said it was out, and it was my job to uphold the Stylebook. So I learned to cross out the serial commas in every article that came across my desk, grumbling the whole time about how an archaic rule born from a desire to conserve space on a printing press was now contributing to the slow crumbling of the English language.
Despite my irritation at this new rule, the unlearning of a punctuation habit (at least in my journalism class) came with learning the history behind a grammatical rule for the first time. Figuring out why newspapers didn’t use the serial comma opened the door to the idea that a rule had to come from somewhere. Later I would realize that every grammatical rule, having come from a series of decisions of some kind of majority in some kind of power, meant that no one rule was actually inherent or automatically better as part of the English language. It was just what that particular group called for.
I wouldn’t proceed that far down the path of grammatical history, however, until college. My sophomore year, when I walked finally came to the Writing Center in to ask about volunteering, Laura Abbott pointed to the couch next to her and said, “We don’t have an intern on this hour. Sit.”
The hardest thing to learn as a former copy editor was focusing on big picture feedback. In high school, I had offered comments if my friends’ paragraphs didn’t seem to have anything to do with their thesis, but they were mostly looking for help on the inscrutable intricacies of grammar and sentence structure, not organizational help. Fortunately, I had already sat through enough creative writing workshops that I knew how to give content-based critiques. If it was better to fix the bones of a story before proofreading, the same priorities could apply to academic essays. But I still found it difficult to jump over those mental speedbumps of typos and commas in order to budget time for the more important issues, like quote integration and paragraph flow.
When I became a Mentor Consultant, our discussions ranged from the business of tutoring to the semantics of our titles to, surprisingly for me, the legitimacy of grammatical constructs other than academic English. Brooklyn gave us articles on African American Vernacular English and the frustrations of first-generation university students and ESL students. What must it feel like, she asked us, to find yourself in a world that not only expects you to play by rules you don’t know, but tells you that every rule you have learned up to this point is wrong?
Realizing that the elitist origins of my beloved grammatical structures erased people’s voices and modes of expression was an unpleasant jolt. Like many people newly aware of their own privilege, I had to confront the disconnect between the thing I loved and was good at – the English language – and the reason I loved it – the power of self-expression. In creative writing classes, the concept of voice is a vital one. It’s often difficult to pinpoint, but the reader knows what pieces have it and what pieces don’t. Many of the workshops I attended throughout my undergraduate career focused on identifying each writer’s particular strengths. Stylistic choice was both a duty and a right; you had to take ownership of the way you chose to express your story, but that agency also granted you freedom.
The unrelenting pressure of academic expectations not only restricted that agency, but implied that even in other areas of expression, the student’s voice would be illegitimate. No wonder so many students either hated writing or resignedly locked themselves into a system they didn’t truly understand.
At my core, I believe that writing is meant to be a universal vehicle for expression, for sharing ideas and experiences and thoughts in whatever style best fits that author’s intent. Even though I still find Jane Austen’s punctuation of long, flowing sentences beautiful, I’m also less likely to cringe at people using comma splices or other stylistic variants because academic language is not the only way to convey an idea. These are not rules that dictate the legitimacy of what students have to say in the first place. They are only the rules of the game they are currently playing.
– Grace Reed –