Grammar Pet Hates (a.k.a. Boy Him Card Read Good)

Warning: this is a rant. Look away if you're not in the mood for rantings :-)

Clarity. That’s all writing’s about. Well, okay - not all. But, without clarity in what we’re saying to people, there will never be complete understanding between human beings. That’s an important point to remember about why we need grammar; why grammar’s important to get right.

As a writer, I tend to pay particular attention to the structure, grammar and punctuation of anything I read – there’s an incorrigible editor locked away inside me, I suppose – and when I come across one of my pet hate grammar mistakes, I almost always throw a Trussie and correct the mistake with a big black permanent marker pen. What can I say – I’m human and some things just get under my skin. And just like everyone else, there’s one thing in particular that sets me a-fizz.

I was catching a train the other week, and right on the wall three feet from my face, surrounded by some Troglodyte’s best graffiti ‘art’, was something that that Trog would have sprayed over if he’d known it was stealing his thunder. I don’t want to risk infringing on some advertising exec’s copyright, so I won’t reproduce the error here, but here’s another very similar example from a well-known UK TV cookery show:

Whoever wins, it’ll change their life forever.

It’s on pay TV. It’s played right at the start of every show. It must be right, right?

Wrong.

What’s the problem? Bad grammar. The sentence has an agreement issue. It starts off singular (whoever), changes to plural (their), then sods off back to singular again (life).

Clarity? No chance. How many winners are we really talking about here? One, or many? You may think it doesn’t matter, but I’m asking myself: ‘How many chefs can win this competition? Can there be only one winner, as the sentence starts off suggesting, and which would be far more exciting? Or, will there be many, as the middle of the sentence seems to predict?

Bad grammar = no clarity = lazy speaker = no respect for me as a listener/viewer/reader.

If the presenter really wanted to ‘card read good’, he would have said (for example): We’re about to change someone’s life forever.

What alarms me most is that this obviously incorrect (and often confusing) way of speaking / writing is becoming increasingly acceptable in media – newspapers, TV, radio; and in publishing.

A while back I flirted with a website called authonomy – writers upload their works, whether finished or in progress, and others read and comment. I remember pointing out a very similar agreement issue to one chappie who’d uploaded a sample of his novel, and who wrote for a big-time newspaper. He also claimed to have a qualification in journalism. Good for him – no, seriously; I admire him for caring so much about the art and craft of writing (communicating) that he’d dedicate time and effort to formalising his qualifications.

But this chap almost knocked me off my seat when he said that I was the one who was wrong; that modern teachers actually tell their students that it’s okay to write sentences like that.

What absolute rot. It’s never okay to allow standards to slip. It’s never okay to turn a blind eye to laziness – or encourage it, for that matter - and claim it’s the modern way.

We’re writers. We work to a given set of high standards and we must always maintain those standards. If we don’t, no one will know what the hell we’re raving on about.

If you’re a writer, aspiring or otherwise, read Lynne Truss’s excellent book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s probably the most cathartic text I’ve read in years, and it sets the bar very high. Please, aspire to achieve those high standards.

Oh, and for all the purists out there, I apologise for starting so many of my sentences with conjunctions. Here’s what to do: scroll back to the top of this article so that it fills your computer’s screen, then take a big black permanent marker pen...

Tense

In the interests of getting the balance of this blog just right (‘...all things Scottish, all things Australian and all things literary...) I’d like to talk today about something related to ‘writing’, and there’s nowhere better to start than at the beginning of the writing process.

Choosing the tense you use to craft your essay, poem, narrative prose, etc is one of the biggest decisions a writer has to make. It’s also one of the first. Get it wrong and your piece can fall flat. Worse, you could turn readers off your writing for good. But if you get it right, you can add tension, win reader empathy and really make your work stand out from the crowd.

Let me start by clarifying what I mean by the word ‘tense’. Tense is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as ‘a set of forms of a verb that indicate the time or completeness of the action expressed by the verb.’

Take the simple verb, ‘walk’. I walked to my office this morning. I like walking in the morning. I’ll walk again just as soon as I’ve finished this piece - to the coffee pot, perhaps.

Those are the three tenses: past (I walked); present (I like walking); future (I’ll walk).

Choosing the most appropriate tense for the article you’re writing is crucial. Although you can write in one tense and edit for another at some later stage, that kind of edit can be huge and almost always involves a complete rethink followed by a complete rewrite followed by divorce and litigation. Making the right decision early on saves that rework (and all those ugly legal fees).

The question is, which tense is right for your project? Well, that depends entirely on what you’re writing.

Let’s look at narrative prose. As an example, I’ll use the opening sentence of my crime thriller Brogan’s Crossing to illustrate the obvious differences between tenses. (Forget viewpoint at this stage – I’ll discuss that in a later post.)

Sam Brogan let the doors swing shut and flicked a glance at every conceivable hidey-hole as he limped into the thickening stench of beer and vomit.

The handling of the verbs ‘flick’ and ‘limp’ are the clues that this is written in past tense. Past is the writers’ favourite and almost always works best for fiction. If you consider that most stories are told after the event, it makes sense to relate those stories in the past tense. Brogan’s story unfolds as we read, and there’s a certain feeling of comfort and security that comes from knowing that these events have already happened. It’s a safe bet, too, because many publishers prefer novels written in this tense.

But I could have written it differently, using present tense, for example.

Sam Brogan lets the doors swing shut and flicks a glance at every conceivable hidey-hole as he limps into the thickening stench of beer and vomit.

Straight away you can see there’s much more immediacy, and more intimacy between the reader and the character. We’re with Sam as things happen to him, and that often works well for action-based fiction.

So, why didn’t I choose this tense to write Brogan’s Crossing? There are a few reasons, but it really comes down to wanting this story to have as much credibility as possible. Many readers, when confronted with present tense narration, find it difficult to ignore the fact that a character is relating story when he/she should be minding events as they unfold.

Now let's look at future tense.

He’ll let the doors swing shut and flick a glance at every conceivable hidey-hole, then limp into the thickening stench of beer and vomit.

This mode of writing can certainly make your work stand out from the crowd, mainly because not many writers use it. But be warned: it takes a great deal of skill to master future tense, and a great deal of discipline to stay focused. You may also be limiting your audience because it reads so differently from the norm.

That’s a quick and relatively simple overview of the differences between the three tenses, (with an absolute body swerve around the topic of pluperfects, past progressives and past perfect progressives. Maybe, one day...)

Past and present are more commonly used than future. It’s not illegal to mix past, present and future together, as long as you do it consistently and with care (e.g. when combining past tense action with present or future tense interior monologue – ‘She sat and watched him drink another beer. I’ll show him, she thought. One day I’ll teach him, and he’ll never talk to me like that again.’)

Choosing the right tense can be a tough decision for a writer to make, often because it’s made in conjunction with a decision concerning point of view. And viewpoint is the next subject I’ll tackle.

For now, though, I’m about to walk to the coffee pot.


Update 20100319 -

Remember I said you could turn readers off your writing for good if you pick the wrong tense? Well, here's an example of what I mean, from a newspaper I was reading this morning:

'Once Ului crossed the coast, it was forecast to weaken quickly into a rain depression.'

The reporter is telling us about an event which is yet to happen, but has incorrectly chosen to use the past tense ('crossed the coast' and 'was forecast'). If you're talking about events that might come to pass at some future date, use future tense.

'Once Ului crosses the coast, it is forecast to weaken quickly into a rain depression.'

See the difference? Readers instinctively know that what you're talking about is yet to happen. And that means you've achieved clarity in your writing.