Whats it all, about Alfy?

Today’s Chicago Tribune has an article about a couple of guys from a fancy-schmancy East Coast school who are roaming about the country pointing out grammatical errors as displayed on signs, store windows, flyers and the like. If it’s out there for public consumption, they’re going to remark on it. Then they confront the authors or their representatives and ask for the errors to be corrected. You can imagine the response – varying degrees of indifference, enthusiasm and hostility, with enthusiasm running a distant third. It seems to be the general opinion that these are just two eggheads with too much time on their hands. Et Too, Brute?

Dartmouth graduates Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson are engaged in a Quixotian task – or perhaps it’s more Sisyphean but I digress. Most people, I assume, are going find their quest a bit ridiculous. What’s it matter if someone doesn’t know the difference between a Ladies room and a Lady’s room? War in Iraq, the dollar tanking, gas at four bucks a gallon and these guys are wasting their share of the world’s petrol roaming around correcting grammar.

Well, it does matter, and for writer’s most of all. In Get Shorty, Delroy Lindo’s character discusses the art of the screenplay with John Travolta. His basic premise is that the writing is secondary, that it’s all about the story and that you can “get someone to come in and fix all that other stuff afterwards”.

If you read enough screenplays, you’re inclined to think that Mr. Lindo may have been on to something. There are many writers who play fast and loose with language. Some engage in unconventional construction purposefully, as part of their craft – and that’s fine, sometimes even inspired – but you have to know the rules to break them.
Think about this; many people who take the time to read are pretty diligent readers. What do you do, as a reader, when you stumble across an error in the text? You stop, right? You make a mental correction and you divert your flow from the story that’s been building up in your mind’s eye. All of a sudden you’re not riding across the sage-covered plains or battling aliens, you’re reviewing your Strunk and White.

To me, anything that distracts the reader from my story is anathema; I treasure their attention. After all, they’re taking their time to read something that I’ve written. And if I’m trying to sell that something, I guard their interest all the more carefully. It’s just good business to write well; you’re a professional, write like one.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of having dinner with the author John Irving. We met near his home in Vermont and spent a few hours chatting about everything under the sun. It was one of the most memorable evenings of my life. Being the presumptuous person that I am, I brought along a manuscript. I proffered it and Mr. Irving was gracious enough to accept it for review. A few months later he wrote to me. Other than the social niceties and to comment very positively on some of my prose, he told me that my work would, in all probability, not receive serious consideration. I had too many grammatical errors. For example, I misused quotation marks on a regular basis. A quote would be written: “You, Ric, are a fucking moron”! she said. I placed the punctuation outside of the mark rather than within.

Imagine how I felt after I received that letter. Columbia College, Chicago, an otherwise fine school, is more interested in the creative process than the correct placement of commas and colons. In all the time I had been there no one ever called me on my mistakes. That’s no excuse, of course, I should have spent the time to learn the rules. You may rest assured that I got to work and figured things out after that. My only defense is to say that had you gone to high school where I did, you would have needed a little help in the English department as well. But then, you may well have gone out and got it.

But that’s all an aside. If you’re going to take the time to write, write well. Cormak McCarthy can write any damn way he pleases. You put a couple of No Country for Old Men under your belt and you can too. But until that day, you’d better pay attention to the way that readers read. It’s not cute to be uninformed or lazy. There’s plenty of that in the world without the perpetrators committing their ignorance to the page. There are no end of The Sound and the Fury fans who are going to dispute my opinion on this, but then you’re not William Faulkner. And anyway, really, that novel sucks.

I know that this isn’t going to change anything. There will not be a movement that springs forward from this moment, devoted to the possessive use of the apostrophe. And I know, now that I’ve hung my ass out there, someone’s going to consider this blog with a fine eye and point out all my mistakes. So just click on the contact Ric tab and have at it. I look forward to hearing from you. If I’m going to be a critic, I might as well have a little fun.

www.rghess.com, 2008 All rights reserved

— Ric Hess, May 21, 06:33 PM

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