The art of grammar was never my forte. I would vaguely participate in the general laughter of a grammar related joke (strained, guilty laughter with a hint of imposter syndrome). I was scarred by grammar at an early age. The spelling tests in elementary school where we would raise our hand to show our score (I averaged about 2 out of 10). The time my teacher wrote Too much detail on my short story about midnight snacking. The time my social studies teacher read my first paragraph out loud in front of the entire class, pointing out each extra comma as if it were a punch line (the class certainly thought it was!). And then a barely passable grade on my English diploma exam, though I swore it was the best essay I’d ever written.
Early on, I decided that words were too much trouble. The rules never made any sense, even when I’d spent extra time learning phonetics, syntax, and structure. In the end, it always bothered me that fone was incorrect, but fan was not. Mouse and mice, but house and houses. ‘I’ before ‘e’ except, of course, after c or in words such as weigh, sleigh, neigh, or my own last name (though Weir didn’t fit into the rhyme). And please, let’s not get started on the silent spelling killers—‘ch’ that sounded like ‘sh’, or added r’s in February (which happens to be my birth month that I’d spelled incorrectly for the majority of my life). Etc., etc., etc.… fill in your own version of irritation (their, they’re, there—don’t feel too bad!).
Nope. Not me. Grammar was a burden and certainly not worth my time.
Except that…after a few years of deciding words were not my friend, I realized there was alchemy in them. Yes, there had been ridicule. Yes, I had a smidgen of social trauma. But goodness—words in the right order could send shivers through the body, empower the imagination, and make real something that didn’t exist before. They are MAGICAL.
Out of all the things I thought I would love, words had not been one of them. Somehow though, they became one of my greatest loves because of what they could do.
So, I spent my first writing years learning the difference between tenses and then points-of-view. The next few years were allocated to tone and voice. The years after that, the intricate ways in which to use a comma in relation to dialogue quotations. And I’ve just started to understand when to use a semicolon vs. a full colon (I had to check the spelling of colon to make sure I hadn’t spelled colon. As it turns out, the body part has exactly the same spelling).
Whew!
Even after all that googling of how to use then vs. than or properly tag dialogue, I still rely heavily on spell check and the eyes of my favorite editors.
So! What is the point of this post other than to (in good humour) ridicule the English language?
Simply this:
- First, you don’t have to have all your skills honed prior to starting something new. The sharpening of your abilities will happen once you start.
- Second, please don’t let your past impressions stop you from learning and growing. We have the tendency to tell ourselves something is not worth doing if it has hurt us in the past.
- Finally, if I had been born in the United States of America, I would never have spelled color incorrectly.
