World, Writing, Wealth discussion
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What is good grammar
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Tim wrote: "Yes, Irvine uses a lot of vernacular. But vernacular is grammatically okay in dialogue. Does he use it in narrative as well? Can't remember? Love it if he does because that's a flick in the eye to ..."Don't remember too, since read last book of his maybe 10 years ago. Heard there is a prequel or sequel out to Trainspotting and Porno. Might grab it at some stage
Hmm. I'm gonna play devil's advocate and sit on the fence for this one. I think it hinges on a few things...1. Intention: Did you make the "errors" on purpose?
@Mr Tim: I love sentence frags and using ellipses in place of em-dashes. I think these are ugly...
@Mr Eldon: I've also made legit errors. These require fixing. And some self-flagellation.
2. Kahunas: If you're gonna be ballsy then stay ballsy.
Don't come crying to me when you (the "royal" you haha!) get a neg review for bad grammar. Because it WILL happen. Celebrate the fact that someone noticed instead *smirks*
3. Hugs: Who doesn't love these?
I'm a mixed bag of contradictions on this topic :)Like Nik, I think it depends on context. Yes I will expect to hold a an article in a publication to a higher standard than a comment on a blog post. Also, I am saddened at the erosion of correct spelling and good grammar in things like news articles because it seems to signal a lessening of respect for the written word. However I do understand that language evolves.
Like Tim, I dislike the grammar police. However I strongly believe that the purpose of grammar is to aid communication, not to stifle creativity. Often I feel the complaints about being stifled come from either laziness (it's too hard, I just want to write) or from a blind knee-jerk against any kind of external order. That has buggerall to do with creativity. If you are a creative person you will continue to be creative as sin despite any constraints. And when I envisage some cool thing in my mind that I want to express in words, I want to know it will be understood and conveyed correctly into the minds of my readers, and that won't happen without some commonly agreed protocols for how to string words together. That's all that grammar is.
Where real writing genius comes in is knowing how to bend the rules just enough to have an impact, to create a new sensation in the minds of readers, while still being understood.
The problem with the grammar police is that they are over-enthusiastic and stamp on anything that doesn't conform to the rules and refuse to recognize this last point.
If you read a reasonably recent "Fowler" you will see frequent references to what has changed since the original Fowler, and many things that once would have been dumped on are now accepted. My view is the predominant purpose of grammar is to make the meaning of sentences unambiguous. So things like dangling participles are bad, or hilarious, depending on your viewpoint. But if there is no possible dispute as to meaning, for me that is more or less OK. I am also less enthused about the grammar police who praise "properly edited" works, then when you look at them, the authors can't seem to get their subjunctives right. Is that bad? It also annoys me when the grammar police pick on split infinitives, saying you don't get them in classical latin writing, not one of them. Of course not - in latin the infinite is one word. The other thing that annoys me is that as English is fragmenting, grammar is also diverging. There was an item in a recent newspaper hear from a University expert who had a quiz, where you had to pick which of two options was correct. When you turned to the page of answers, there was quite a surprise (at least for me). All the answers were correct, some in UK English, and the rest in US English. The strange thing here was that I got them about half right for each option, and this is apparently fairly average for New Zealanders - we seem to be somewhere in between the US and the UK, which means in my writing, even apart from any real blotches, I am going to get attacked from one sort of grammar police. Can't win :-(
Tim wrote: "He watched the rainfall in a vertical sheet. It was a grey day for August and the greyness seemed to somehow intensify the heat..."doh! i saw that on my second read-through. my daughter would've definitely caught that. she'll even make corrections to my subject-verb tense agreement:
"Rubble, gravel and wide swaths of what look like dried blood cover the floor."Correction: (view spoiler)
Had 'waiving the gun' instead of 'waving' pretty much in the 2-nd sentence of the book after editors and all until someone noticed
Nik wrote: "'waiving the gun'"Freudian slip ^_~
Had a wander instead of wonder in first para - corrected but...
Exactly, Ann-:)After Alex's intro, should switch to cold weapons really
This just reminded me of an episode of Futurama where giant brains arrive on Earth and turn everyone into idiots. The main character is immune because he's already an idiot so they trap him in classic literature and his solution is to write his own book and trap the brain in it."Now he's trapped in a book I wrote; a world of plot holes and spelling errors."
"Big Brain am winning! I am the greetest! Now I must leave Earth for no raisin!"
I read 'rainfall' as a noun and while, in a strict sense, it does not match 'in vertical sheets,' if I know what the writer means -- and if everything else is there, meaning the writing itself -- then I give it the benefit of the doubt. What I do find funny are dialog tags like, "I'm dying!" Tom croaked. Instead of just using the more or less invisible 'said.'
On the other hand, I really enjoyed some of Irvine Welsh books and went that extra mile to master the Scottish slang he used. So 'fitba' for 'football' or 'kerds' for 'cards' didn't really sound as ungrammatical in his books.
If you deliberately makes something ungrammatical and the result is 'cool', then it might work.
But when I intend 'coach' and write 'couch', it's quite a different story -:)