How Not to Be Bad at Grammar

Who wants to memorize rules?

Not I.

Not you.

That's okay, though.

You have a better tool for the job: intuition.

Recognizing patterns is what your brain does. It's great at building precise statistical models to make sense of complexity. The rational mind doesn't need to worry about memorizing rules. It needs only to pay attention to what's important. Intuition will handle the rest.

All you need to do to be better at grammar (or anything) is to form habits of noticing. Practice noticing when you're reading. Practice when you're writing. Noticing will become easy. It will feel effortless.

To form positive habits, invest thought into the behaviors you want to adopt. Think about the reasons behind these suggestions. Ask why these things are the way they are. If you understand their purpose, they will become part of your 'common sense.' There will be no need to memorize or recall anything. Learning and practicing like this is intuitive, like music.

As you read through these suggestions, make small decisions to pay more attention to specific things, then move on. Take it as slow as you need to, and be patient with yourself as you learn. Expect to make mistakes. Otherwise, you're not learning.

What is grammar, anyway?

Grammar is the system of pieces and patterns that make up a language. It is not the set of rules that dictates specific usage. It's an ever-changing description of an ever-changing language.

Why is grammar important?

If you want to drive a vehicle responsibly, strive to be understood.
This means driving in a predictable manner.

If you want to write responsibly, strive to be understood.
This means writing in a predictable manner.

We read words by memorizing and recognizing their shapes. Our eyes jump from phrase to phrase, skipping over many words. This is okay because we overlay our expectations onto the words we don't look at.

It's an efficient mental shortcut, but its optimal performance requires predictable content. Understanding this behavior enables us to write in a manner that is easy to read and understand. It allows us to communicate our points efficiently and effectively.

Understanding our own words is important. The better we understand our own words, the better our hope of being understood. And the better chance we have of understanding others' words.

We use even simple words without understanding them, such as "another." Many of us have never taken the time to consider its composition. "An other." It's not "a nother." Thinking of the word as "a nother" leads to awkward phrases like "a whole nother."

You learned to say "Alice and I" instead of "me and Alice," but were you ever taught why? Putting yourself last is polite and all, but that was never the problem. The problem was that we were always using the word "me" even when "I" was appropriate. This hypercorrection has us always using the word "I" even when "me" is appropriate.

When you write, "here's a picture of my friend and I at the beach," I read, "here's a picture of I at the beach with my friend." You feel that too, right? Doesn't feel good, does it?

"My friend and I's house." Hear yourself. "I's"? Are you okay with that? We already have two words that mean "I's": "my" and "mine." If you're not sure which one to use, switch the order so it reads like, "my and my friend's house."

Spend a few seconds to think about the words you're using, and you can avoid the most embarrassing mistakes.

What is a sentence?

Every complete sentence contains two parts: a subject and a predicate. The subject is what (or whom) the sentence is about, while the predicate tells something about the subject.
(https://arts.uottawa.ca/writingcentre/en/hypergrammar/the-parts-of-the-sentence)

A subject by itself. Is not a sentence, nor is a predicate. But sometimes, fragments pretending to be sentences are okay. Especially if they help you make your point, and if they come in familiar patterns. But only when you want your writing to sound like someone performing slam poetry. Or like someone who doesn't know when to stop talking. Or whatever.

Verb tense is, was, and will be.

If you had known then what you knew yesterday, you would know that to know is not to know, too.

Verb tense is like the key signature of music. It's like the stage lighting of a set. It's an Instagram filter. But beyond all those things, it's a way to express yourself in the dimension of time. Pick the tense that fits what you mean, and be consistent about it.

When we're speaking, we'll start out in one tense, and before we know it, we've ended up in another. This is not a mistake in itself. A single sentence may connect different points in time. Tense, like time travel, was always to be used wisely. Verbal time travel for no purpose whatsoever will likely be disorienting.

Pay attention to word order.

Put modifiers next to their targets. Words like "only" and "even" can apply to any piece of the phrase following them. If you use the word too early, the reader must carry it to its target.

Many people won't even notice. Most people will even understand what you mean when you put the modifier very far away from what it's modifying. But that's only because they're very good at making sense of these patterns. Even the smallest rearrangement of words can not only make them more precise but also let them flow. If you're only going to use "only" the way you're used to hearing it, you miss an opportunity to be even more precise.

And don't split infinitives. An infinitive is like the "default mode" of the verb. It always starts with the word "to." It's better not to put words between them.

Don't not avoid double negatives.

To avoid not putting "not" where it belongs, don't you disagree that it's not better not to keep using double negatives?

Sometimes they serve an important purpose. In those cases, put the 'nots' as close to their targets as you can without making them uncomfortable.

But in most cases, they are not unapparent attempts to get around saying what you mean. It's deliberate obscurity.

Choose the best word.

Use clear words in familiar ways. Avoid ambiguous words, clichés, and worn-out phrases so misused their meaning is lost to you, per se.

Actually, don't use any word or phrase if you're not sure you know what it means. For example, don't say "per se" until you know how to spell it. Look it up. While you're there, get a deeper understanding of its meaning.

And if you do know what lots of words mean, sure, you can celebrate your impeccable vocabulary at every occasion, but not without divulging your insufferable narcissism. No one cares how many words you memorized.

But, beautiful words chosen purely for their clarity can sustain at least a desultory embellishment. But if you throw in a cool-sounding word you snagged from a thesaurus without bothering to understand it, you'll sound doltish to those who are familiar with the word.

Celebrate your vocabulary! Use it to find the best word! But don't flaunt it if you don't want the majority of your readers to hate misunderstand you.

Protip: Look up words you think you already know. Every concept can be understood more deeply, and our assumptions about words are often wrong to some degree.

Pay extra attention to similar words.

Lose the loose spelling; lead or be led. Lie down and lay aside your differences, or breathe your last breath. Or decree a collage of college degrees. Would you rather have a massage in a desert, or a message in a dessert? Google "commonly confused words" and find your mistakes spelled out for you, because there are one or two too many to count. They're their own category of error.

Skim this list and notice familiar mistakes:
http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/style-and-usage/commonly-confused-words.html

If you forget which word is correct, look it up. It takes only a few seconds.

Stop saying "myself" unless you mean it.

It is an opinion held by myself and others that this deserves its own section. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact myself or any of my team. This includes Alice, Bob, and myself.

People who want to sound professional don't realize they're doing this. They use "myself" as a fancy alternative to "me" or "I."

Whenever you're about to say "myself," see if "me" or "I" fits instead. If it does, use it.

"Myself," "yourself," "himself," "herself," "itself," and "themselves" are all the reflexive pronouns. They serve a specific purpose, and that is to show that the subject and object are the same entity. They're not there for decoration.

Pay attention to capitalization.

Capitalizing Random words is Distracting. Even if you use this to Emphasize certain Words. First words of Sentences. Proper Nouns. That's it. Please. I'm Begging you.

Unless You Want to Talk About Titles.

Capitalize everything by default, then uncapitalize unimportant words. This is the general rule for title capitalization.

The First and Last Words Are Always Capitalized.

Separately Capitalize Hyphen-Joined Words and Phrases.

These Are Lowercase in a Title:
Articles: a, an, the
Coordinating Conjunctions: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so (FANBOYS).
Prepositions fewer than five letters: on, at, to, from, by, etc.
http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/capitalization/rules-for-capitalization-in-titles.html
http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/coordinatingconjunction.htm

Whitespace is a thing too!

Spacing has a significant impact on your reader's pace and fatigue.

Many people find it daunting to dive into a huge wall of text. If your paragraphs are very long, you might be trying to say too much all at once. Identify the main ideas and separate them. Reduce them to their essences. Put them in a natural order. This organizes your thoughts into a concise flow.

Using space well is like pausing to give your audience time to think. If you don't do this, you risk burying your most profound insights.

Punctuation matters.

Many people write without any punctuation whatsoever you know what im talking about it sounds like a droning voice in my head you know what i mean i mean i get it punctuation seems tedious its just little dots and marks who cares where they go you get the idea it just keeps going and going but if you stop reading before you get to the end you might miss the point theyre trying to make but who knows where that thought begins or ends am i right

Punctuation is as much a part of writing as letters. Periods and commas serve as visual anchors. They give your eye a natural breaking point among the words, like a save point in a platformer.

Additionally, these help you convey which tone you intend the reader to hear.

You may think that having "too many" commas impedes the reader's flow, and to this I would agree, but only if by "too many" you mean "misplaced," meaning commas, which are inserted, where they don't belong, but this is equally misleading as when they're skipped see what I mean? And as when used where periods belong, this is a very common mistake, you know who you are, please stop, unless it's funny, in that case, carry on. . . .

That reminds me . . . an ellipsis is three dots, not, like, seventeen.................
And it's not a terminating punctuation mark, so. . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#In_writing

Apostrophes' abuse.

They follow consistent rules, and they're not difficult.

Contractions. How do they work? I'll tell you. When you squish words together, consecutive letters compress into a single apostrophe.

When you attach an 's' to make a word possessive, it needs an apostrophe. Except when that word is "it."

Now stop saying "it's" when you mean "its." When I read this mistake, I shout in my head "IT IS" and make you sound ridiculous. I just thought you should know. But then I think about how YOU ARE writing is reinforcing this confusion in the minds of the rest of IT IS audience, and I sigh.

What do you do with words that are possessive but already end with an 's'? Put the apostrophe at the words' ends.

Would you like to know what drive's me nut's? Apostrophe's that have no business being here. Go home, superfluous apostrophes. You're drunk.

Commas, whatever.

They do, believe it or not, follow well-defined rules.

When you start a sentence like this, it has a comma. It doesn't have a comma when you start a sentence like this. The word "when" is one of many ways to connect two ideas, while sometimes establishing an inequality between them.
(http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/subordinateconjunction.htm)

When you interrupt yourself, as in this example of an aside, separate it with commas (or parentheses). This helps you see the edges of the original thought, like visual bookmarks. In this way, commas often separate the main idea from nonessential information.

When you use a comma to separate two or more clauses, try not to separate a verb from its subject.

Good: I break this rule, and I break others, but I'm not sorry.
Bad: I find this extra comma sometimes repulsive, and hate it.
Okay: Other times, it fits the flow of the sentence, as well as the voice of the writer.

When you list one, two, or three or more things, why not continue the pattern in a predictable way? A comma separates each item from the next. We denote the last item in a list of three or more by putting an "and" or "or" before it. This prepares our brains to transition out of "list input mode" and continue. It's simple and consistent.

For a more complete list of rules commas follow, look at this:
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/owlprint/607/

Hyphens—and dashes—okay; semicolons, meh.

If a word can be combined with-out a hyphen, do it—but only if it's not confusing.

Hyphens are like tiny word-magnets. But be careful with magnets, and don't put them where they don't belong. You're reading this left-to-right writing from left to right. The next word or phrase could stand on its own two feet, or it could be part of a two-or-more-part word. Hyphens answer this question before it arises, but they're often unnecessary as well.

Some compound words lose their hyphens, but they follow the same patterns.

"To log in, click the login button."

I recommend this hyphen-related guide:
http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/hyphens.asp

Sometimes—and this depends on style—you might choose to use em-dashes – or en-dashes surrounded by spaces – to denote the beginning and end of an aside, which we've already mentioned, instead of commas.

You can also use a dash to connect two related sentences. Semicolons do this too; they work as well. But know they might make you sound pretentious if used too often.

When used incorrectly; semicolons are distracting.

Think about it; it's a colon and a comma combined. It's the introductory nature of a colon combined with the connectedness of a comma. That's not an accident; it's a love child, and its parents are two complete sentences who care about each other.

In closing...

Protip: If you can't decide between two words or phrases, compare n-grams and choose the most familiar one.
(https://books.google.com/ngrams/)

Limits exist to be tested. Rules exist to be broken.

Break whatever rules you want. Remember, these "rules" are descriptors—not dictators—of language. If we always follow the rules, never stepping outside the boundaries, our language stops evolving. Our voices lose their uniqueness.

Also break the rules because once you've established a predictable baseline, the anomalies have more meaning. Meaning, they stand out and are more effective, because the reader is more confident in your ability to write what you mean to write.

Finally, be mindful of your readers, and if you want to count me among them, you'll make it easy for me, and I will thank you for it.

(Source: my Instagram)