Tag Archive for: writing rules

Grammar Crimes

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By Lois Winston

Like Henry Higgins, grammar crimes make me cringe. I’m sure you remember his immortal words: “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” He then went on to add, “In America, they haven’t spoken it in years.” He wasn’t wrong.

Grammar Crimes

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Grammar Crimes

Thanks to my junior high school English teacher, I suffer from a multitude of grammar pet peeves. Throughout seventh and eighth grade, Peggy Riley Hughes drummed grammar into me. Since then, poor grammar, whether written or spoken, makes me cringe. I can’t help it. Those rules were burned into my brain.

Split Logs, not Infinitives

To boldly go where no man has gone before. Remember that opening from Star Trek? Cringe-worthy! Gene Rodenberry obviously didn’t have Peggy Riley Hughes as an English teacher. If he had, he never would have split his infinitive.

Sadly, the Oxford English Dictionary did the unthinkable years ago and declared that it’s now okay to split infinitives. It’s no longer a grammar crime. The horror! Poor Peggy! At least she didn’t live long enough to experience such a crime.

License to Take Liberties

As authors, we have license to take liberties with our writing. For instance, when I write dialogue, I don’t necessarily write in perfectly formed sentences because people rarely speak in perfectly formed sentences. We speak in sentence fragments. So do our characters, but that’s okay. We want our characters to sound real, not stilted.

Style often dictates that sentence fragments also be used in narrative, depending on the genre, the plot, the era, and the characters populating our novel. Again, that’s perfectly acceptable.

If you Break it, Own it

Deliberately committing a grammar crime is okay if there’s a reason for doing so. The foremost reason is to keep your characters believable. “Me and him were late for school.” works if the dialog is spoken by a young child or in narrative, if you’re writing the scene from the child’s point of view. It would stand out like the proverbial sore thumb if spoken by a college professor.

Breaking this Rule Doesn’t Make You Sound More Intelligent

The grammar crime that makes me cringe the most, though, is the misuse of pronouns. For some reason, even very well-educated people constantly misuse pronouns, substituting “I” for “me” because they think using the nominative case for the objective case sounds more intelligent.

There are Three Types of Pronouns

Nominative: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, and who

Objective: me, you, him, her, it, us, them, and whom

Possessive: my, your, yours, his, her, hers, its, our, ours, their, theirs, and whose

The nominative form is used when the pronoun is the subject of a sentence. The objective form is used when the pronoun is the direct object of the sentence or is part of a prepositional phrase.

WRONG: He invited Mary and I.

RIGHT: He invited Mary and me.

WRONG: The coach had to choose between Mary and I.

RIGHT: The coach had to choose between Mary and me.

Hopefully, the OED won’t someday decide that it’s perfectly acceptable to replace the objective with the nominative. “He invited I.” “He sat opposite I.” “The coach chose I.” Holy cringe-worthy grammar crime! 😵‍💫

However, because we’re dealing with English, there’s an exception to this grammar rule. Because in English, it seems there’s always an exception to just about every rule. In this case, it’s the “to be” verbs, also known as “linking verbs.” When using am, is, are, was, were, or be, you use the nominative form of the pronoun for the direct object, not the objective.

WRONG: It was him.

RIGHT: It was he.

WRONG: It’s me.

RIGHT: It’s I.

If you’re now thoroughly confused, you’re not alone.

Never the Both of Us

Finally, there are many grammar rules I remember from my junior high days and know not to break, but I don’t remember the reason for the rule. For example, it’s either “the two of us” or “both of us” but never “the both of us.” Don’t ask me why. I forgot the reason for that grammar rule many decades ago, if there ever was a logical reason. It’s quite possible that just for fun, some grammarian at Oxford or Cambridge decided to make life and the English language more confusing for all of us. After all, they didn’t have TV, the Internet, or video games back then. They had to get their amusement from somewhere.

Do you have a grammar pet peeve? Post a comment for a chance to win a promo code for a free audiobook download of any of the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries or Empty Nest Mysteries.

~*~

USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Learn more about Lois and her books at her website www.loiswinston.com. Sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mini-Mystery.

The Grace of Rules

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by Bethany Maines

I was all set to write a post today about authors who have
influenced me and then I opened the internet and poked around. I shouldn’t do
that; twenty minutes of internet time and suddenly I know too much about what
people I don’t know are wearing to events I don’t care about.  But I also read two things that altered
the topic of today’s blog. One was the facebook post of an alcoholic
celebrating another year sober, and the other was a blog post about the rules of
mystery writing. The most immediate response to the alcoholic was along the
lines of “Thank you for sharing your struggle; it helps me.” The first comment
on the writer’s post was “I don’t really like rules and my novels turn out
fine.” 
And on one hand, I totally agree with that commenter. I also
don’t like rules. I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t like having
solutions dictated to me. Nobody is the boss of me, but me. So there. Nyah!
(Sticks tongue out.)
You know what I do like though? Novels that make sense. And
although I tried for years to just wing it, that doesn’t lead to novels with
consistent internal logic, or, as is otherwise known, a plot. It’s also
extremely inefficient. And with a dog, a kid, a husband, friends and an
extended family who all prefer to see me occasionally, I do not have time to be
wandering through the morass of plot lines. So eventually I gave up and laid
down a few ground rules for myself. 
And since I am the boss of me, I
figure that’s ok.

But while I’m sympathetic to the rules are
for sissies commenter, I must admit
that it seemed like she could have used some of the grace that the alcoholic
referred to in her post. She spoke of not understanding how there could
possibly be a solution for her, but sometimes just showing up and following
instructions is enough to get you through to the next day. She spoke of the
great support of knowing that other people had similar struggles to her own.
Writing a novel and alcoholism are not at all the same. But the idea that
sometimes a set of instructions, a little community spirit, and grace can get
you through to tomorrow is pretty universal. Thank you all for sharing my
writing struggles and for your gracious comments!





   

Bethany Maines is the author of the Carrie Mae Mysteries, Tales from the City of Destiny and An Unseen Current.  You can also view the Carrie Mae youtube video
or catch up with her on Twitter and Facebook.

The First Rule of the Writing Club: There Are No Rules

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by Susan McBride

I was going through old files the other day and dug up notes for a month-long online workshop I taught to 65 aspiring authors a few years back when I was writing my Debutante Dropout series. The topic was “Making Mysteries Memorable.” I focused on choosing your protagonist, casting your secondary characters, dialogue, setting, plotting, and pacing. We covered a lot of turf, but most of the questions I got in the end–which I jotted down for posterity–had nothing to do with any of those things, not really. They had to do with the “rules,” as in:

“Exactly when should the body be found?”

“How many suspects must I have?”

“Am I allowed to cross genre lines or will that confuse editors?”

“Precisely how many words should my manuscript be?”

“What kind of quirky job must my protagonist have in order to carve a niche in the traditional mystery market?”

To every one of those questions, I replied: THERE ARE NO RULES.

Look, the Big Guy might’ve scribbled His Ten Commandments on stone tablets, and every politician in D.C. has a different slant on what the amendments in the Constitution actually mean (depending on which lobbyists are footing his or her vacations). But there is no single Guru of All Things Written who has laid down unbreakable rules for composing a short story or book (save for format, though I’m not talking about fonts and margins here).

Let me repeat that in case you were distracted by Snooki Snickers hawking her, ahem, debut novel on TV (yeah, seriously! Like she even knows how to spell “Simon & Schuster”):

No one is God or governor of your novel but you.

I know Elmore Leonard has some wonderful rules floating around out there. They come from his experience as a writer and a reader. And good for him. I’ve heard other writers speak about their own rules, which dictate everything from a particular word count to acceptable number of suspects to what kind of first sentence you must have and on which page the body should be found.

My theory is this: if we all followed one set of rules, our books would seem eerily alike. Isn’t the point of creative writing to be creative? Telling stories involves using your imagination, going boldly where no writer has gone before. You don’t want to be like everyone else. Think of books that really hit it big in recent years, or at least captured a good deal of attention from readers and critics (and I’m obviously including non-mysteries here):

THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN
THE DA VINCI CODE
THE HELP
TWILIGHT
All the HARRY POTTER books

What makes them stand out?

They’re unique. They’re intriguing. They express a fresh point of view. They don’t limit their audience. Best of all, they don’t follow rules.

Here’s another place where rules don’t count: how long it takes you to get published (or in these days of publishing alternatives, how long it takes you to turn any kind of profit).

I’ve heard authors who give clear advice on this subject, too, namely that if you can’t cut the mustard within a handful of years you should drop out of the game.

If someone—anyone—feeding you arbitrary guidelines is enough to convince you to quit then, for Pete’s sake, quit. Because you’ve got to be tough in this field. The publishing business will eat you up and spit you out if you let it. It’s competitive, it’s rough, it’s unpredictable. If you can’t hack it—and all you want is to be published as opposed to feeling a compulsion to write—cut yourself some slack and do it as a hobby. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

If you’re in this to establish a career, you will do it for AS LONG AS IT TAKES. You will keep writing, try your hand at new things, adapt to the ever-changing market, and never give in to discouragement. As my mom likes to say, “Nothing worth doing is ever easy.”

A few more pearls of wisdom:

Don’t let other people tell you what to do. Write the book you need to write. Use whatever messy, ungrammatical, un-rule-like methods you need to lay down the first draft of your opus. Nobody can do it for you. No one can instruct you on what’s best for your novel. Listen to your heart and your gut. (And then listen closely to the critique of at least one or two disgustingly honest friends who are voracious readers.)

The most important aspect of writing a novel is finishing it. Otherwise, you’re just like, well, Snooki. Because, Lord knows, that girl probably can’t write anything more complicated than “BUY MORE BRONZER” on her grocery list. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if she even has a ghostwriter for that.

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