Grammar School

by Meredy Amyx

Meredy is a recent retiree from a thirty-year career as an editor, the last decade of it in technical documentation at Cisco Systems. She currently freelances part time.

Your editor has invited me to write an open-ended series of articles on matters grammatical. This is the first of the series.

Introduction

When I was ten, I discovered that language comes with rules. I fell in love with grammar right then and have never lost my enthusiasm for it. I think grammar is innately lovable, fascinating, and magical. Even if it's not as exciting for you, I hope that we can look at it together with interest and appreciation and not a trace of fear.

This general introduction describes an approach to grammatical issues that has evolved out of my years of editorial experience. It sets a framework for future articles. I'll tackle a number of common grammatical problems, providing explanations and addressing them in terms of the concept of relationships.

It's About Relationships

When we write anything, from a technical manual on networking protocols to a note on a birthday card for Mom, we are concerned with relationships. We must ask questions such as these:

• What is the relationship of the author to the audience?
  
  
• What is the relationship of the audience to the subject matter?
  
  
• What is the relationship of the document to some larger set of documents?
  
  
• What is the relationship of the document to the rest of the world?
  
  
• What are the relationships of the parts to the whole?

The answers affect the tone and style we use, the assumptions we make about the reader's level of understanding, the selection of content, the order and arrangement of parts, and on and on. In some sense nearly every decision we make about the document (do we sign it with love and kisses?) has to do with relationships.

Grammar too is about relationships. To use correct grammar is to put the parts of a sentence or utterance, both syntactic and semantic, in the right relation to one another.

Sentence Therapy

Sometimes when we go in for a medical checkup, we come out with news of a problem we didn't know we had. But most often we seek out a professional because we know something's wrong. We may not know what it is, but we have symptoms of something. We see a doctor for help with both diagnosis and treatment.

An ungrammatical sentence shows symptoms too. Some are minor — a scraped elbow, a mosquito bite — and don't really impair the meaning of the sentence. It can go to work even with a leg in a cast and still get the job done. Symptoms that only an expert can detect can sometimes be overlooked, but all sentences function better if their parts are in good working order.

A sentence that has noticeable problems needs attention. The chief symptom is failure to communicate: from a little vagueness, at one end of the spectrum, to downright incomprehensibility at the other. And often — much more often than you might think — that lack of clarity will be found in the vicinity of a grammatical error. Sure, fuzzy thinking alone compromises meaning; you can write a perfectly grammatical sentence that makes no sense at all. But a grammatical error can expose a more serious problem in much the same way that red spots and a fever point to an underlying condition. How? When you try to fix the mistake, you find out you can't — because you have no idea what the sentence is really trying to say.

Future Articles

In future articles we'll diagnose instances of grammatical error and prescribe treatments. Feel free to send me your questions, preferably with examples.

Copyright © 2010 Meredy Amyx.