Rules for Paradise
11 October 2024

The better you want to write the more grammar you’re going to need.

Poetry is memorable speech, wrote Auden, his poetry a lovely instance. All good writing—every love letter, effective text, every good post and paper, each article worth reading, each email worth sending—is talking tidied by art, transcribed to paper or screen, and made memorable by craft and care and courage and a radical kind of clarity. Good writing says a lot with a little. Learning rhythm, disdaining cliché, grounding abstraction, remembering the earth, recalling your humanity (which you share with your readers), not trashing the tongue—these are the disciplines of grace, and they are how fine writers achieve on all manner of pages and stages what Auden had in mind for poetry.

Mastering grammar, on the other hand, is not guaranteed to make your writing sing. But writing well, the achievement in your phrasing of a simplicity not too clear and a clarity not too simple, turns on the adequacy of your sentences. Good syntax underwrites good style. Originality is babble if no one else knows what the hell you mean; sentences that lose their way, lose both cred and readers.

These are a few of the most common grammar gaffes I come across, including in my own writing.

1. The dangling modifier.
“We make recommendations for avoiding injuries in this report”
“A so called friend of Heather Mills claimed that she worked as an escort with Mills in a documentary that aired on Tuesday night”
In these two examples, small phrases (“in this report”, “in a
documentary”) appear at the wrong place and suggest something other than what the writer meant.

2. Loose pronoun reference.
“I took the hat from the chair and put it on my head.” (Put the chair on my head?) And who’s doing what here?
“Zara found a jacket in the wardrobe that her grandmother had worn when she was a girl.”

3. Commas out of place or no commas at all.
“However it appears that as this report was generated from old data the problem is easily explained.”
“All 300 people employed at the plant, will lose their jobs ”
“I apologise for the delayed response, I got distracted by some emergencies in the office.” (Sentence splice.)

4. Singular verbs after compound (plural) subjects.
“Alcohol and liver damage had taken its toll.” (Should be “their”) “The obstinacy and corruption of the ruling junta is delaying the arrival of aid.” (Should be “are”) “There’s hundreds of them.” (Should be “There are”)

5. Use of “less” for “fewer”
“Twelve items or less”
“She reads less books than she should.”

6. Widespread confusion between “which”and “that” and the overuse of “which”, as in “You are entering an area which contains steep cliffs and loose edges.” (Better as “that contains”.)

Writing well is a paradise, in other words, for all of us who read (and write), and grammar is its rules. Come learn some.

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