May 2006

This month The Grumpy Grammarian is an essay entitled "Parting Words," which was handed out to my students at the end of the current semester.

When we have our last class of the semester in English 101, I am always tempted to give a final lecture (full of wise thoughts, of course) while my students are still cornered with no graceful way to escape. This is, however, cruel and unusual punishment, especially when the last class includes the departmental essay. Everyone wants to be done with it and out of there. Therefore, I offer in writing what I might have said.

You may feel that you didn’t learn much, and that’s really okay. You may even feel that you’re more confused now than before you took the class, and that’s even better. A big part of getting smarter is finding out how little we know. As Socrates said, wisdom is the discovery of one’s own ignorance. The really stupid people in the world are those with the arrogant view that they know everything – or almost everything. Learning should be a lifelong experience, and every answer we think we have should lead to more questions. Certainty, which may seem to be a desirable attribute, can actually impede intellectual growth. The more certain we are, the less likely we are to search for and discover new ideas.

That’s enough abstract philosophy. It’s probably not my place to tell you what learning is all about, and there’s no reason to pay attention to me because you know better what you want to do with your lives than I do. This wasn’t a course in philosophy, so let’s look at what the course has been about – writing.

I have not tried to convince you that writing is a skill worth cultivating. I didn’t have to; you’re required to take English Composition, and that’s that. However, I am convinced that writing is one of the most useful and gratifying skills that we can develop. That’s why I have taught it and continue to do so, even when I’ve reached a stage of life in which I have the leisure to do something else. I’m sure you’ve all had the urge to share with others those things that you consider enjoyable, useful, or fun, and although it may be hard for many of you to think of writing as fun, that is precisely the urge that drives me.

This is not to say that learning to write well isn’t hard work. It is. Unless one is especially gifted, the development of any skill – music or art, carpentry or bricklaying, surgery or computer programming – is hard work. Indeed, even those who are especially talented in a certain skill will often relate how hard they worked to develop it, how there always seemed to be one more hurdle to jump before they were as good at it as they want like to be.

At some indefinable point, though, the hard work of developing a skill segues into the joy of using it. The musician, for example, struggles painfully through the early stages of learning to play an instrument until – sometime, somehow – all that work pays off in the sheer joy of playing, even when there’s no one around to hear the performance. In the same way, many a young writer has plodded through grammar drills and tossed countless unsatisfactory drafts into the wastebasket before coming to enjoy writing. Some of us (a lunatic fringe perhaps) get to enjoy it so much that we don’t even care whether anybody ever reads what we write.

For many – perhaps most – people, the idea of writing for its own sake or as a form of enjoyment is utterly alien. This is because the early stages can be tough and because many of us would rather do almost anything than study grammar. However, don’t fall for the increasingly common misconception that one can write well without a reasonable grasp of grammar and usage. These principles – I prefer to call them conventions rather than rules – are the building blocks of language.

Without them we can no more construct coherent sentences than we can safely drive a car without knowing how to operate the steering wheel, brakes, and accelerator. If your sentences are verbal wrecks, it’s because you don’t know how to “drive” the language.

Furthermore, learning the conventions of grammar takes even more patience and practice than learning how to drive a car. We may think we know enough to get along because, after all, we use the spoken language from the time we are toddlers, but we don’t really understand how language works. And to “drive” the language effectively, we have to be not only drivers but also mechanics who understand how to work with the complex device that we call language.

Part of what makes writing difficult at first is that we are called upon to do two things at once: to think about what we are saying and to consider how we are saying it. That’s tough. It’s a bit like driving a car and having to think which way to turn the steering wheel every time we need to go around a corner. The good news, though, is that, much of the “how” part eventually becomes automatic. Believe it or not, we can eventually sense where the punctuation marks go and what the right words are, with no more conscious thought than we give to which way we need to turn a steering wheel.

Reaching that level of “instinctive” correct grammar and usage is not is easy, but it’s not impossible. Once we reach that point – or come close to it – the rewards are tremendous. We can concentrate on expressing our ideas rather than on the mechanics because the latter have become automatic. Along the way, we have probably also learned how to organize our thoughts, so that too is more intuitive.

As we write better, our readers begin to believe that our ideas are also better. Friends, relatives, coworkers, and bosses who read what we write may wonder how it is that we were suddenly “struck smart.” We probably are not, in fact, much smarter, but we are expressing our thoughts more clearly – so we sound smarter.

The truth is that our development in writing may have caused us to think more clearly. Much emphasis is placed on the importance of thinking before we write; too little is given to the power of writing to help us think. As we externalize our ideas and as we seek the right words to express them, we fine-tune our thoughts. On paper or on a computer screen, we recognize silly ideas for what they are and revise them or discard them. And sometimes thoughts that we didn’t even realize we had appear almost miraculously as we write. One of the best ways to solve a problem is to analyze it in writing rather than to mull it over internally. Is that so astounding? It shouldn’t be. Even mathematical geniuses need to write out complex equations before they can solve them.

Beyond all the practical values of the ability to write well is, as I’ve been saying all along, something far more important – the joy of doing it. Writing becomes pleasurable, a form of entertainment. It becomes catharsis, a way of purging the emotions. It is no longer a frustrating puzzle but a game, something that we do for the fun of it. Yet, like all games, it has rules. Just as, for example, tennis would be pointless without the net and the boundaries of the court, writing doesn’t make much sense without rules.

Like all games, writing demands discipline and concentration if we are to become good at it. It requires practice too. However, unlike some activities, it is not something we can stop doing and pick up again years later where we left off. If we don’t keep on using our skill, it will deteriorate. Of course, once we have discovered the joy of writing, we won’t want to stop doing it.