Back to Basics and Eating our Grandmas

Although it still feels summer-ish there's a definite back to the classroom whiff in the air. I've had a good summer with plenty of excellent short breaks. Not that I totally stopped working, you understand. I was reading and reporting on a batch of novel manuscripts which kept me pretty busy. Now they're done and dusted, it's time to take stock.

What struck me was how the same old problems kept rearing their ugly heads; the usual suspects, such as repetition, clunky dialogue and showing and not telling. What I wasn't prepared for was the lack of a certain type of comma, so much so that I'm thinking of creating a new charity called Save The Vocative Comma. Has a certain ring to it, don't you think? Perhaps not.

Anyway, you don't find these little fellows in office reports or essays and perhaps children no longer write fiction at school. Whatever the reason, as I waded through novels manuscripts this summer I was struck by how often sentences like these cropped up:

Come here Jack.     I love your dress Mary.     It's a lovely day isn't it?    Come and say hello to Peter Susan.

The joky way to explain its use is:

I'm probably showing my age when I bemoan the fact that schools no longer teach grammar and syntax but I don't think it's old-fashioned for those of us for whom writing for publication is our profession or our goal, to be interested in how language works. You don't need to be a Latin scholar to learn why there's a difference between your and you're, I or me, we and us, it's and its etc. If we learned the basics, there would never be any confusion or wild guesses. The same goes for where to put those pesky apostrophes market traders seem to have so much trouble with.


And while I'm having a moan there's something else I want to get off my chest: the unnecessary fog of confusion that surrounds the use of capital letters. For instance, is it Dad or dad, Mum or mum? The answer is that it depends on its function in the sentence.

When writing about somebody's father (or mother, uncle, aunt, grandfather etc) the first letter is always in lower case. It's only capitalised when it's used as a name, which, as we all know, is a proper noun and takes a capital letter. So:

Jenny told her dad she didn't like his tie.


Jenny said, 'I don't like your tie, Dad.' 


Did you spot the vocative comma there as well?


Does any of this matter? Is it worth getting my knickers in a twist over? There are more important things to worry about. But this blog isn't about how to eradicate hunger, poverty war and pestilence. Believe me, I would if I could. It's about writing. But surely, you say, as long as people know what you mean it doesn't matter how you spell things or whether you bother with silly little things such as commas or apostrophes?  I think it does. If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

But it's more than that. It's all about people having confidence and faith in you as a writer. One of the essentials of fiction is the ability to suspend disbelief. It's a kind of magic trick. Only, readers can't be tricked if they're constantly reminded of the mechanics. (Remember the moment when the 'mechanics' of the Wizard of Oz was revealed behind the curtain?)

And if readers are critical, what about agents and editors? It may be unfair but if they read a manuscript that's littered with basic errors, they're going to think, rightly or wrongly, that you have no idea what you're doing it's going to make them think twice about taking you on.

This isn't to say that if you've written a story that's a stunner in every other way, punctuation or grammar errors will prevent your manuscript being accepted. Of course not. No submitted manuscript is ever totally clear of  errors. But too many and too many elementary mistakes and you're in danger of harming your chances of an agent getting past the first few pages. You wouldn't turn up at a crucial job interview in a smelly T-shirt and without having brushed your teeth, would you? (Another vocative comma, by the way.) Give yourself a fighting chance.

Learning to write right is not difficult, If you missed out for any reason (and it probably wasn't your fault) it's never too late. Buy a grammar or punctuation guide. (Be careful of the internet; there's plenty of misinformation out there.)  Mastering or mugging up on the basics will give you more confidence in your writing.

By the way, that cartoon is wrong. The second sentence should actually read Let's eat, Grandma. So there. (Once a pedant, always a pedant.)

I've noticed I seem to have lost a lot of readers lately? Am I too bossy?  Maybe it's time my elephant and I went off for a long walk.