A few years ago when I was a simple post-Baccalaureate student trying to scrape together enough English credits to enter the Graduate program, I won a contest in my English Cornerstone class. It was a very prestigious contest and only two people, that is my partner and I, were able to secure the prize that day. I know that many hearts were broken as we accepted our award in front of the entire University of Central Oklahoma's Liberal Arts Building's Room 115's Class of mostly Freshmen and Sophomores for correctly looking up the page numbers of specific grammar rules and totaling them before anyone else. Okay, so maybe it wasn't that big of a deal, but the prize was. The Little Brown Handbook: Instructor's Annotated Edition.
Or at least I assume it was an awesome prize, I've never really read through it all that closely... but the rest of the class seemed pretty jealous and the teacher told me that if I didn't appreciate it, I should give it to someone else. Well, I assured her that I did, and boy did I ever have... have I ever... I use that thing like twice at a time.
Good grammar is like an elusive wind goddess: one of those sexy ones that flits around seductively, but when you mistreat her, her face gets all dark and gaunt like some blood-drained hag. There's some conspiracy, I think, within the writing community that revolves around memorizing books like the LBH and perfecting the use of commas, semi-colons, colons, and even Oxford commas like that last one. This conspiracy isn't about sharing the beauty of good grammar with the world. No sir! It's about becoming grammar's pimp. Then we get to decide who gets to see her as this sweet, flowing, word-nymph and who gets stuck with ten-inch pumps, eyeliner that would make an Egyptian princess blush, muffin-top spilling out of child-sized g-string, bra-barely-hides-the-chest-hair, grandma grammar. Yet somehow, we - as writers - have this as our goal. Do you know how many times I've heard someone rattle on about how once you know the rules of writing well, then you can break them? Twenty-seven times. And that's just since I started counting! It's like we have this goal of someday being allowed to write like we did in fifth grade. Granted, all of our best poetry was probably written in middle school, but should that really be our goal?
I say thee nay! I think somewhere down the line someone wrote a book, it became really popular, and then a reader was all like, "hey, why didn't you break up this sentence when it's clearly a run-on?" Well, the writer had to save face, because it was a book reading and signing event at the Barnes and Noble across from the Acropolis, so he just says, "Oh, young fool. I wrote that particular jewel as a run-on to symbolize the endless struggle of life." From then on, we've revered anyone who sells us a book and hammers in a healthy dose of "creative" grammar choices. Maybe I'm just not there yet, but I can't do it. I've got enough grammar problems as it is... heck, I just stopped spelling it with an "er" at the end.
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