Grammar, gram·mar | \ ˈgra-mər
“the set of rules that explain how words are used in a language” (taken from here)
On this episode of The Blogging Files, and this beautiful season (MERRY CHRISTMAS!! 🎄) I want to talk about how important grammar is to the world and understanding in general.
Did you know that grammar can make or break the quality of your writing and speech? Think about it. One absent comma can have you thinking two different things.
For example:
Thanks for calling me grandma.
Thanks for calling me, grandma.
The first sentence implies that someone called you a grandma. The second sentence implies that your grandma has called you on the phone, perhaps.
My favorite grammar mistakes are when people confuse to with too or even two. As a word lover, I always immediately see thee errors but I’m not rude about it. I know that English is a hard language. As much as it comes easy for me (grammar) I actually was lazy and hated learning about grammar in school. (But I think my love for writing surpassed the boredom because I always passed every English class, lol.)
Most of my articles get sent back to me because of bad present and past tense. I suck at those, I know. I’m not good at descriptive writing (which is why the past two NaNoWriMo novels I’ve been working on are unfinished but that’s another post for another day) so naturally when I’m describing what someone “said”…it’s always pretty bland. I plan on researching some books on descriptive writing soon. (And finishing that novel from NaNoWriMo 2021.)
In a book that I picked up at Barnes and Nobles called Understanding Grammar: From Split Infinitives to Dangling Participles, an Essential Guide to Understanding Grammar, the writer, Kathleen Sears, talks about some examples of how important grammar is by mentioning:
- “A missing word in a 1631 printing of the Bible promoted rampant promiscuity”
- “A missing hyphen in a NASA document forced the destruction of a billion-dollar satellite that was meant to collect data on Venus” (my favorite)
Can you imagine seeing people running up and down the street doing the nasty all day because the Bible said it was ok to do because of a misplaced word? And what about the billions of dollars lost when that satellite was destroyed all because of a missing hyphen? These are simple mistakes that have costed dangerous amounts of trouble and could have been caught had someone rechecked their grammar.
My grammar book also shares this in its opening page on the examples above:
As these examples show, correct grammar is essential for proper communication and understanding. If you use grammar incorrectly, it reflects badly on your speaking and writing skills–and it may cause others to doubt your reliability. Proper English grammar, correct English grammar, is a vital matter.
Kathleen Sears
Grammar is essential to a language’s speaking and writing. I know a lot of people among social media, people like to totally disregard the your/you’re’s, the to/too/twos, and the weird cross up between adding the apostrophe before or after the s…(does it show possession or what? I don’t know…but I will look it up. I promise.) For me, grammar is very important to keep learning as a writer and as a native English speaker. Think about this, another important point on why grammar is so important: I also speak Spanish, and one of the things I need to learn to better understand the language is its grammar. When I learned the basic grammar and how the sentences are constructed, speaking became much easier and came with less thinking. Grammar is the building block of a language. And while the speaking world tends to give lots of leeway and ignore lots of sentence structure (like saying “they be” and other things like that), if you want a message to properly hit someone, you need to understand basic grammar of the language.
I have a few books on writing and blogging and I wanted to let you know that in both, they explain that grammar is very important. My book on blogging stresses that good writing is important for keeping an audience. This also means brushing up on any grammar or punctuation basics. Errors are sure to turn someone away from your work, no matter how good the knowledge is.
So, this holiday season, I hope you appreciate the beautiful gift of grammar. And now, I will leave you with a few of my favorite prefix words, in English and Spanish.
English:
co- (means with, together) like cooperation, co-ed
hetero- (means different) like heterogeneous
spec- (to look, to see) like spectacles, spectator
Spanish:
mal– (means bad) like mal, maldecir (to curse, to talk bad to)
des– (do undo something) like descomponer (decompose), deshacer (to undo)
sobre– (to go over) like sobresalir (to stand out), sobrepasar (to overpass)
*I just learned these three words the day of writing this blog post. I am still actively learning both languages!
Here and here are the two books I am reading on blogging and grammar. Check them out if you’d like!
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Copyright © Shanedra Smith 2021. All Rights Reserved.
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