The Most Basic of Basics
"It's not what you don't know that kills you, it's what you know for sure that ain't true."
- Mark Twain
One of the things that a great many people seem to know for sure is that they don't need any knowledge of the rules of grammar, punctuation, or syntax in order to write to a publishable standard. It is possible that I am overstating this; perhaps many of them merely know for sure that what they write is correct, or at least allowable. Whichever it is, it comes under the last part of that Twain quote: what these writers think they know for sure simply isn't so, and it's killing them…or at least, it's killing their stories.
A glance through the various websites that allow writers to upload their fiction without any pre-screening requirements should be enough of a demonstration for anybody. I don't know what some of these people are thinking. It's obvious that they didn't even bother to run the spelling checker before they put their stuff up for everybody to see. And I really don't understand those writers who blast any reviewer who dares to mention the fact that they obviously don't know what a run-on sentence is, or how to correctly punctuate dialog, or the difference between "affect" and "effect." Are they trying to drive readers away?
But incomprehensible as this behavior is when I see it in amateur arenas, it pales beside the would-be professional writers who blithely send their un-proofread, un-reviewed, un-spell-checked work off to editors in hopes of selling it. What are they thinking? (Answer: They aren't.) This is like going to a job interview for Ambassador to France dressed in stained and badly worn blue jeans, a muscle shirt, mismatched socks, and filthy old running shoes with the laces in knots. It doesn't matter what your credentials are, or how well you might actually be able to do the job; you aren't going to get in the door for the interview.
I have some sympathy for the writers who truly don't know any better. It is very hard to improve your skill set when you don't yet realize that it needs improving … and I've run into an unfortunately large number of younger writers who were never really taught grammar, punctuation, or syntax because their teachers were more concerned with encouraging them to be creative and get their stories down on paper. There's nothing wrong with encouraging creativity, but in the long run, you still have to know the rules. At a bare minimum, you have to know that there are rules and that you don't know what they are, or you will never realize that there are helpful things you still need to learn.
I have no sympathy at all for the prima donas who do know their work is full of errors, but who are convinced that it doesn't matter. "It's fiction," they say. "I don't have to follow any rules." (Wanna bet?) Or: "Oh, it's the copyeditor's job to fix all that." (It isn't.) Or "Editors are used to seeing unpolished manuscripts." Well, yeah - editors see a lot of manuscripts full of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspelled words, and incorrect punctuation. They see them in the slush pile. And what they do with them is, they pick them up out of the slush pile and move them into the "rejections" pile as fast as they can possibly manage. It's an obvious and easy filter: if the writer didn't care enough about the work to clean up the grammar, spelling and punctuation, the writer probably didn't care enough about it to do a decent job on the plot, characterization, and setting, either.
The real trouble, though, isn't with the inevitable editorial rejection. It comes earlier than that. The real trouble with ignoring the basic rules of English is that it limits a person's ability to write effectively.
A writer whose work is littered with sentence fragments and run-ons because he/she doesn't really understand what a sentence is (much less what fragments and run-on sentences are) cannot make effective use of sentence fragments to increase tension or pacing or emphasis, because there are already so many fragments in his/her stuff that another one isn't going to have any effect at all. He/she can't use a run-on sentence to give a breathless feel to a particular character's dialog, because run-on sentences are all over the place already, and one more isn't going to be a change. In extreme cases, such writers aren't even aware enough of syntax and sentence structure to get adequate variation in their sentences, resulting in prose that just plods along, regardless of whatever exciting or emotional thing is happening.
It's the contrast from standard English that makes sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and other non-grammatical techniques work. If everything else is in standard English, dropping some unusual syntax, punctuation, or grammar into the text has an impact because of the change. The less often the writer does it, the bigger the impact. Lots of non-standard syntax, grammar, etc. means no change, no contrast, and no effect.
Those problems are a severe handicap while writing. Even if the writer (or their tame English major best friend) goes over the story later on and fixes the punctuation, grammar, and spelling, the story won't be as effective as it could be. The writer has lost the chance to get the maximum possible impact from his/her writing, because a bunch of really basic tools are missing from his/her toolbox and some things are nearly impossible to retrofit during revisions. Besides, if the writer doesn't know what a run-on sentences is, and that they need to avoid it most of the time unless they're looking for a particular effect, they aren't going to be able to get that effect any better during revision than they were during the writing phase.
Of course, if a writer doesn't care about doing the best work, or even about doing a good job, that "writer" doesn't have to know the basic rules of English (or whatever language they're using) and doesn't need to think about learning them. I don't really understand why such people want to write, though.
