🚀 go-pugleaf

Charlton Wilbur makes some very interesting points about breaking the rules,
and in general I agree, but I have to take issue when he argues:

In short, I guess, the eighth-grade, sentence-diagramming, right-and-wrong
concept of grammar has to be abandoned. It simply doesn't work for writers.

--To which I reply that Norman Mailer can write run-on sentences, and so can
lots of amateur writers, but Mailer knows when he's doing it. (The dangling
participle that begins Harlot's Ghost, however, is another story altogether!)
In my fiction-writing classes, students are quick to grasp basic concepts of
plotting, characterization, symbolism--but can't punctuate dialogue to save
their lives (or their mss.); slip from one point of view to another without
even noticing; trip over their grammar; and spell no better than the
Sorcerer's Apprentice.

This frustrates me because the whole point of my course is to help them put
together a sendable package by the end of the semester, and the basic English
errors are *the* major barrier to that goal. I know an occasional illiterate
manages to become a successful writer (and the bane of his or her editor's
life), but I'd suspect most fiction mss. from unknown writers live or die on
the impression they create in the first couple of pages. If the editor sees
that the author is innocent of English basics, the story is close to doomed;
and why not? Why should anyone expect literary success without troubling to
master simple craft? As soon expect innumerates to get serious attention from
professional mathematicians, or tone-deaf pianists to fill Carnegie Hall.


--
Crawford Kilian   Communications Department   Capilano College
North Vancouver BC Canada V7J 3H5
Usenet: Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca
Internet: ckilian@first.etc.bc.ca