It's a bane of my life.
I was positive I knew all about grammar. Didn't I get As at O and A level? Didn't I get a bronze medal in my English RSA for heaven's sake? And yet...
I put commas in all the wrong places. I muddle up my semicolons and my colons. Recently, I discovered a Thing called a sticky sentence? Who knew?
I checked it out and, as if by osmosis, found myself at the ProWritingAid site, where I can use a free on-line tool to double check my grammar. I'm loving using it but, boy, does it use up a lot of time. It only likes handling about 500 words at a time. I am checking around 79,000. Hmmm...
And then, today, this lovely quote from AdviceToWriters landed in my inbox: The Arrangement of Words Matters
Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene.*
It tells you.
You don’t tell it.
JOAN DIDION
I shall look at my pictures instead of my anxiety, and see what it tells me to do with sentences.
Much more enjoyable.
