“A Lesson in English Grammar: The Little Things”

Ashley Flynn

Based on the opinionated views from a highly critical, easily angered teenager over-boiling with hormones on the essays and stories she has read on the Internet and at school. Anyone who reads through all of this has a saint’s patience and a worrisome amount of free time. Shouldn’t you be doing homework or writing that research paper your teacher’s been bitching about for the past two months?

Recommended for grades seven and up due to coarse language and the excessively mean-sounding tone used throughout the entire piece. More recommended for English teachers with a sense of humor. In no way is Ashley Flynn qualified to teach English.

By the way, some of the examples are numbers and some are letters. The letters indicate examples and/or sections edited into the guide as things keep popping up. Sorry for any confusion.

UPDATE: July 18 2009 - Added a Quick Reference List to the Introduction, added a little something to Section II (very minor edit).

~CONTENTS:

I. The Exclamation Point and Italics

II. The Comma

III. The Semicolon

IV. Ellipses and Other Forms of Punctuation Not Yet Mentioned

V. Capitalization and Proper Titles

VI. “Of” and “That”

VII. “So” and “Very”

VIII. This Word Versus That Word

IX. “The Reason… is Because”

X. Verb Tense Changes and the Passive Voice

XI. Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement and Subject-Verb Agreement

XII. Adverbs

XIII. Sentence Fragments and Other Sentence-Related Stuff

INTRODUCTION: (An introduction that you can totally skip over no less.) Wait a minute! This wasn’t under the table of contents. You’re probably thinking that I lied to you. Well, that’s too damn bad. In all honesty, I didn’t know a lot about English grammar until I began learning Spanish grammar. Then, for my own curiosity’s sake, I went to the nearest bookstore and picked up a few technical books on English grammar and sentence structure. If you pay attention, you learn just as much about English grammar as you do a foreign language. Certain concepts of grammar transcend language. The moral of this story: pay attention in a foreign language class.

WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS?

As a writer, the only way to realize mistakes is to make them and have others call you out on it, which is nothing new. If you don’t like criticism (or you’re only looking for praise) and your goal is to publish, you really shouldn’t make your career in writing. This is a guide that takes a look at the “little things” that can actually make a huge, huge, huge difference in your writing. While some may argue that grammar, while important, is not as important as the thesis and proofs or the plot and characters, atrocious grammar can alienate your readers. Your readers won’t be able to understand a damn word of what you are trying to convey. Unless, of course, you want to write another Jabberwocky, which is perfectly acceptable but rather difficult since Lewis Carol. But I’ve digressed yet again.

We speak, write, and read English on a daily basis but don’t know much about the actual mechanics of English grammar. There are two “categories” of English: written and spoken. Although both are fundamentally the same, the latter is much more flexible. It is more acceptable to break more rules speaking in English than to write in it. This causes us to often write with “spoken English” rules and forget the more formal, more correct “written English” grammar rules.

SUCCESSFUL WRITING IS ALL ABOUT CLARITY.

Grammar, believe it or not, can make or break a story or essay--especially if you aim to publish. (I’m rehashing what I said above, but it is important.) You can have an amazing story or an amazing thesis with equally amazing points, but it could be riddled with the overuse of commas, exclamation points, or capitalization of the wrong words. You’d also be surprised with the extraordinary amount of clarity that is produced from proper grammar provides. All it takes is some time and patience.

IF YOU’RE NOT AIMING FOR PUBLISHING, FINE.

Even if you aren’t aiming to publish, you should be curious as a writer writing as a hobby or as a student of English trying to pass the HSPA and SATs. That’s like saying you’re a baseball commentator but don’t know how the game works. You don’t have to play well, but you should know the rules and such to enhance your coverage. Likewise, writing as a hobby or for school is the same. You don’t have to write well, but you should know the mechanics behind it. This lack of care is what makes America the target of many jokes around the world and contributes greatly to our overall “American ignorance.”

There’s no practicality, you say. I don’t need this, you say.

Well, if you really believe that, you’re a moron. Do you not have the GEPA, HSPA, or SATs to face? Yeah, I thought so.

WHAT PROMPTED ME TO WRITE THIS?

I love writing. I would love to make a career in writing if it weren’t ninety-percent chance and five percent good luck. Currently, I pursue writing as a hobby with a dream of getting published sometime in my life. So I go on for the forums about books and writing. I also have an account on (and I’ve proudly quit ). But no matter where, on the Internet, I go for the writing, I see grammar mistakes that totally ruin a piece worth saying, “This has potential.” But this isn’t just on the Internet. In school, peer editing is sometimes a teacher-imposed torture (or enhanced interrogation technique).

Certain grammar errors will completely ruin the reading experience. This may be the great age of the Internet where chatspeak and unintelligible garbage run rampant, but grammar is still essential to learn regardless of career goals. While I accept the fact that language eventually does change over time, you should still use the proper grammar rules. Knowing grammar is as important as being earnest, and all it takes is some sense and sensibility (Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen references, respectively).

LET ME FIRST INTRODUCE THE CONCEPT OF GRAMMATICAL PARALLELISM.

Once you know the rules of grammar well enough, you will also know which rules you can totally toss out the window once you leave education and use your writing skills for money. Creative writing, in my opinion, is much more flexible. However, throw away as many rules as you want, but grammatical parallelism is the key to any essay, short story, novel, or rant. This concept is, what I also know it as, grammatical consistency. That typically means:

-Keeping a consistent verb tense throughout the piece.

-Subject-verb agreement.

-Pronoun-Antecedent agreement

-Using the serial comma or not.

-For lists, each bullet is a “-” instead of a “~”. (This is merely an example and is up to the writer to decide what his/her bullets in a list look like.)

-Titles of books are underlined or italicized (one or the other, not both)

-Whether or not to write out numbers

-Time (example: 8:40 versus eight-forty)

When writing for yourself, your preferences are your own (which gives grammar a little bit more flexibility). However, you must be consistent. Consistency is the key, and you can keep consistency if you take time to refer to this when you need to. In all honesty, certain grammatical concepts such as the serial comma or writing numbers falls under this. If you write numbers out (example: 3,455) as numbers, then you should write every number as such. This goes for essays and creative stories. However, for standardized tests and school essays, abide by the rules your English teacher explains to you. You must become one with consistency, young grasshopper.

Quick references for clauses and the parts of speech:

Independent Clause - a group of words that have a subject, a verb, and an object; a complete sentence. (Example: I wrote this guide.)

Subordinate Clause - a clause that cannot stand by itself as one sentence; it must be part of another sentence. (Example: which is good for you.)

Adjective Clause - a subordinate clause that modifies, expressing what kind of which one. (Example: A friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, came to visit the other day.)

Subordinate Adverb Clause - an adjective, adverb, or a verb telling where, when, in what, to what extent, under what condition, or why. (Example: Whenever you want, please visit.)

Noun Clause - a subordinate clause that acts as a noun. (Example: I knew what the right thing to do was.)

Noun - a person, place, and thing. (Abstract nouns are nouns that have no physical existence ex: the jungle’s heartbeat; Concrete nouns have physical existence ex: the jungle’s trees.)

Verb - an action or state of being. (Transitive verbs are verbs that have an object that the verb is referring to ex: He {found the money}; Intransitive verbs have no object ex: He’s looking.)

Adjective - a word that modifies a person, place, or thing (a noun).

Pronoun -

Adverb - a word that modifies an adjective, verb, or another adverb.

Conjunction - a word that connects two words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. (Coordinating conjunctions connect two grammatically equal words, phrases, clauses or sentences ex: He eats {bread and butter}; Subordinating conjunctions connect elements that are not grammatically equal ex: He is better at butter bread than I am.)

Article - only three words: a, an, the.

Preposition - words that show certain relations between other words. (With, for, by, in ex: A man with fish for sale gets up early in the morning to set up his shop.)

Interjection - an outburst of emotion.