(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Linguistic Love and Grammar Grudges

Gram­mar is impor­tant for a writer to know in the same way col­or the­o­ry is impor­tant for a painter or musi­cal the­o­ry is for a musi­cian.  You have to know some.  It’s good to know more.  It’s best to know as much as you can.  But if you act like it’s a crit­i­cal part of the art, you’re not prob­a­bly con­fus­ing being a pedant for being a cre­ative, but you’re prob­a­bly being a douche to boot.

Teach­ing ESL and devel­op­men­tal Eng­lish, along with a nerd hobby/fascination with cul­tur­al-lin­guis­tics stud­ies makes me pret­ty non-pre­scrip­tive about gram­mar. I don’t have one of those lists of pet peeves about seman­tics and gram­mar that so many writ­ers seem to think makes them good writ­ers.


This arti­cle about a Fish a Rat and a Pre­scrip­tivist pret­ty much explains my prob­lem with hard core pre­scrip­tivism.

Plus most of the peo­ple I know who let them­selves have par­tial aneurysms in their brain every time some­one uses “lit­er­al­ly” before some kind of hyper­bole are going to turn around in five min­utes and call their cheese­burg­er “epic,” so it’s all just selec­tive hypocrisy any­way. And don’t even get me start­ed on how often the “chic move­ments” with­in pre­scrip­tive gram­mar are actu­al­ly wrong. (For exam­ple, say­ing “I am well.” to answer the ques­tion “How are you?” does­n’t prove that you are a high­brow sophis­ti­cate. It proves either that you are mere­ly not sick, or that you don’t know link­ing verbs work.)

I sure­ly would­n’t give most peo­ple such grief, for these aren’t MY pet peeves.  How­ev­er, when fussy lit­tle pedants insist on wear­ing the man­tel of supe­ri­or­i­ty, I feel like it becomes my life’s quest to take them down a peg or two.

Myr­i­ad as a Noun?
Pet Peeves
A Lin­guis­tic Themed Pot­pour­ri
Four things Every Writer Should Know About Gram­mar
Glad to Hear You Don’t Have Con Crud.  (“I am good.” vs “I am well.”)
Gram­mar Memes
A Fish a Rat and a Pre­scrip­tivist Walk Into a Bar
10 Words Writ­ers Need to Learn to Use Cor­rect­ly
Word Crimes? (My response to the Weird Al song)

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