Has anyone ever corrected your grammar? Annoying isn’t it? Actually, it’s more than annoying. It feels downright personal. It’s hard not to have an emotional reaction. You might feel embarrassed because–you know–if you make a grammar mistake you’re obviously uneducated. Or you might feel something worse: shame, reinforcement of what you think is true: “I suck at writing,” “I’ve always hated grammar.”
This gotcha game stinks. It’s wrongheaded and a waste of time, but guess what? It happens to everyone—even when you’re a writing professor. Yeah, I’ll say more about that in just a minute.
But first, here are three reasons you should ignore the grammar police when they point out your "bad grammar":
1. Most of the time they're wrong
Many grammar truisms are in fact not true. Many of these you've no doubt heard: Don't end a sentence with a preposition. Don't split an infinitive. Don't begin a sentence with a conjunction. All based on myth. All consistently ignored by good writers.
Even seemingly safe grammar rules turn out to be questionable. One should not write Drive slow, but rather Drive slowly. Not so fast. Ever heard of a flat adverb? Don't worry if you haven't. Your ear tells you there's nothing scandalous about saying Please drive slow on your way home.
Most of the time, your "bad grammar" is just a usage issue. Someone doesn't like that you used the word further instead of farther. But these judgments are just that, judgments, and they are constantly evolving. Many writers preserve the distinction between further and farther. Many don't. If you don't, it doesn't mean your grammar is deficient.
2. Ideas are more important
Here's the thing—and I almost hate to admit this—writing doesn't have to be sterling to get things done or to move people. In fact, writing that is "ugly" on the surface can be insightful and powerful, while writing that is grammatically flawless can be tedious and trite.
I see this all the time in both my jobs. As a writing teacher, I'm often moved by students with powerful voices who peer deep into the human experience but fail to see sentence boundaries, while I'm nearly put to sleep by writers with a strong grip on grammar but loose fingers when it comes to cliches and generalizations.
At the office, people who are productive and influential are usually not grammar pedants. Don't get me wrong, writing well is important for career success. But writing well and writing for the grammar police are two different things.
The bottom line: It's not always how you say something, but whether you have something worth saying.
3. Your time is too precious
If you argue with with a member of the grammar police, you will almost certainly lose sight of the issue you cared enough to write about in the first place. And this brings me to my story about how the grammar police will even attack a writing professor.
A while back I published a blog post that I'd worked hard on. I was proud of it. I thought the post offered an interesting perspective. I was looking forward to engaging in a good conversation about the economic situation of writing teachers. Guess what happened instead?
I got into a two-day argument with a reader who questioned my use of the phrasal verb makes for. She was adamant I should have used makes instead of makes for. I won't bore you with the details of the exchange, but I wasted two days arguing when I should have been promoting my blog post and discussing my ideas rather than my word usage.
Don't waste your time.
When should you care about what the grammar police say?
Ignoring the grammar police doesn't mean ignoring your readers. Sometimes "bad grammar" is bad writing, and bad writing creates all sorts of problems, from confusing your message, to hurting your credibility.
But how can you tell the difference between "bad grammar" you can ignore and "bad grammar" you can't afford to ignore? Easy. Read a lot and write a lot. What? You wanted something more specific? I'm not joking. Writing is hard, even without the threat of people shaming you for human mistakes. You can use a free writing app like Grammarly, which can spot those human errors and challenge you on issues like clarity and style to enhance your writing. You can find some pretty good online writing courses out there as well. But at the end of the day, writing is a skill you never stop developing, it's a life-long endeavor, with life-long rewards. And it's a skill and practice too valuable to be cheapened by the gotcha gang. Happy writing.
