Humanity's future depends upon good grammar

The Bad Grammar award has been charged with sneering misanthropy, but as a judge I say that our children's lives are at stake 

If you tolerate this, then your children won't be next … a Tesco sign. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

So far in my four decades, I have lived a life blissfully free of controversy. No paparazzi have ever staked out my front door and, with the odd (in both senses of the word) outraged commenter aside, I have never, to my knowledge, sparked loathing and fury in anyone I either know or don't. So it was with an ease prompted in equal measures by naivete and common sense that when Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler Academy emailed me several months ago to ask whether I would like to be a judge for this year's Bad Grammar award, I agreed with not the slightest bit of hesitancy.

Well! Who knew that an interest in how the English language works was tantamount to announcing oneself as a frothing-mouthed raving loony? Are sentence structures the new poll tax? I could only assume so from the frankly hilarious rage that greeted the announcement of our shortlist this week. I feared I had failed in my capacity as a judge already when my presence on the panel did not prevent the prize from being raged against on the website I write for, when one especially outraged chap wrote that I and my fellow judges, Jeremy Paxman and Rowley Leigh, were "peddling sneering, condescending, dismissive, misanthropic, elitist, made-up twaddle"? He suggested that our rackety prize was some kind of undefined Gove-ian conspiracy and, perhaps mistaking our prize for actual legislation, that we were "language police". I could spend longer dismantling this particular blog but, first, life's too short and, second, seeing as the gentleman's main objection seemed to be that the prize was inspired by a book (that I had heretofore never encountered) called Gwynne's Grammar, and he himself has written a competing grammar book, I'm not convinced there's really any need.

Even lovely Michael Rosen seemed to feel the bile rising at the prospect of these awards, calling them "nasty" and insisting that bad grammar is "no big deal. We all make mistakes. In most circumstances it's no big deal. We get what the person meant from the context."

Indeed we do. This, it seems, lies at the heart of this issue: should grammar be prescriptive or descriptive? In other words, should we all adhere to a set of hard rules from the 16th century or should we just blunder along, let language take its course and assume we know what each other means? Obviously, the answer lies between those two extremes. But I am going to speak up here in defence of good grammar and, contrary to the suggestion of one columnist, my defence is in no way endorsed or inspired by Michael Gove.

One doesn't need to be Thomas Gradgrind to be interested in the rules underlying the English language, or to believe that good communication and understanding depend on clarity. Grammar is not just about learning sentence construction: it's about speaking clearly and plainly and cutting through obfustication. But even aside from that, and most importantly of all, good grammar will help you get laid.

I learned grammar at my school in the US and I am eternally grateful I did because, when I moved to London in the early 90s at the age of 11, I learned that grammar was not, weirdly, on the syllabus. As a result, I found learning foreign languages, such as French and Italian, far easier than some of my new English friends did because I understood the subjunctive tense and verb conjugations. Only one other girl in my year had also had grammar lessons and she, too, found learning foreign languages a comparative doddle. When we were about 16, a bunch of my friends, including my grammatically-correct friend, all went off on a German exchange and my friend, with her superior grammar skills, pulled not one, not two, but THREE German boys. I'm telling you, Munich has yet to recover from her visit, and grammar lessons were never so popular as when the German exchange trip returned to London.

As for my second piece of evidence for the defence, as anyone who has ever dabbled in internet dating knows, there is no bigger turn-off – none – than a spelling or grammar mistake in a prospective suitor's biography or correspondence. Yes, everyone makes mistakes and language mutates and blah blah blah, but in the pitiless world of internet dating, it is simple human instinct to rule someone out on such grounds. I've had friends cancel dates due to a simple rogue apostrophe. So consider that, grammar descriptivists. The perpetuation of the human race depends on good grammar.

So when the award rolled around on Thursday night, we all felt the heavy weight of the human species on our shoulders. Our shortlist was pleasingly outraging and the Idler Academy was veritably packed out with passionate fellow grammarians. There were some delightful entries (I particularly like the cafe chain Apostrophe misusing an apostrophe, although that is, strictly speaking, more a punctuation mistake than a grammatical one) and some downright depressing ones. Rowley Leigh voted for Tristram Hunt's incomprehensible speech, but Jeremy Paxman and I both voted forTesco, so it took the prize. Tesco, it may be remembered, was nominated for using "less" not "fewer" in reference to numbers on loo-roll packaging – "Same Luxury. Less Lorries" – and for describing its orange juice as "most tastiest". I suspect this will come as a disappointment to those who predicted that our Gove-ian prize would go to Hunt (he was runner-up) but that's the problem with dismissing basic grammar rules: you don't always talk sense.

Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

in Books, Literature, Writing | February 19th, 2013 Leave a Comment

Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction.  He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hemingway on Writing.

We’ve selected seven of our favorite quotations from the book and placed them, along with our own commentary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and readers alike–find them fascinating.

1: To get started, write one true sentence.

Hemingway had a simple trick for overcoming writer’s block. In a memorable passage in A Moveable Feast, he writes:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.

There is a difference between stopping and foundering. To make steady progress, having a daily word-count quota was far less important to Hemingway than making sure he never emptied the well of his imagination. In an October 1935 article in Esquire ( “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter”) Hemingway offers this advice to a young writer:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

3: Never think about the story when you’re not working.

Building on his previous advice, Hemingway says never to think about a story you are working on before you begin again the next day. “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Moveable Feast:

When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

4: When it’s time to work again, always start by reading what you’ve written so far.

T0 maintain continuity, Hemingway made a habit of reading over what he had already written before going further. In the 1935 Esquire article, he writes:

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.

5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.

Close observation of life is critical to good writing, said Hemingway. The key is to not only watch and listen closely to external events, but to also notice any emotion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and identify precisely what it was that caused the emotion. If you can identify the concrete action or sensation that caused the emotion and present it accurately and fully rounded in your story, your readers should feel the same emotion. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes about his early struggle to master this:

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.

6: Use a pencil.

Hemingway often used a typewriter when composing letters or magazine pieces, but for serious work he preferred a pencil. In the Esquire article (which shows signs of having been written on a typewriter) Hemingway says:

When you start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none. So you might as well use a typewriter because it is that much easier and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.

7: Be Brief.

Hemingway was contemptuous of writers who, as he put it, “never learned how to say no to a typewriter.” In a 1945 letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway writes:

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.