The Truth About Grammar & Error Patterns

Lots of student-writers we work with seem to feel like “grammar” is a trick that gets played on them, a kind of weird game with shifting rules that apply sometimes but not others.  And we understand why they feel this way.  The truth is that grammar is kind of a game, and its rules do shift, at least a little, depending on when and where you're writing.

That said, however, writing should not feel like a trap waiting for you, a chance to make errors you don’t understand* – and it doesn’t have to.  

Our purpose in this section of the Resources for Writers site is to help you understand and feel a little more in control of some patterns in sentences that we think most readers will object to in formal writing.  When a teacher says you’ve written a “fragment,” for example, we can tell you what that means and how to avoid it.  And we will in this section of Resources for Writers.

But let’s take a brief step back first and think a little bit about just what grammar is and why it matters. 

The Truth About "Grammar"

As we've suggested, we understand if grammar feels to you more like a game to be played than a scientific procedure to be learned and followed.  In fact, we believe that thinking about usage standards in this way is kind of healthy.  As any linguist will tell you, the “rules” of English grammar aren’t absolute in the sense that the laws of physics or geometry are:  what counts as proper usage changes significantly across contexts – that is, the time, the place, and who's involved in the conversation.  And knowing how to adjust – being in control of what choices to make about your language and when – will serve you well in your writing.

Here’s a simple historical example:  Ever notice that instead of asking “What do you say?" or exclaiming “I don’t know where that is," as we would today, William Shakespeare, who died in 1616, would have asked “What say you?”** and would have said “I know not where that is.”***  Simply, the order of words in sentences in Shakespeare’s English was different than word order in our sentences today.  Similarly, as many first-year students at Oswego learn quickly, you stand “in line” upstate, even though you stand “on line” in Long Island.  (In fact, you might well stand on a mad long line in Oyster Bay compared to the wicked long line some people will say you stand in here on campus!...)

This kind of variability isn’t the exception – it’s the rule.  Click here to get a sense of what “englysshe”**** sounded like in the late 1300s, when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales.  It’s what people commonly call “Middle English,” a language significantly different from Shakespeare’s English – and probably unintelligible to a speaker of Shakespeare’s day -- even though it’s only about 200 years older.  

You may very well not recognize it as a version of “English” at all.

That’s why the socio-linguist John McWhorter suggests that we think of language not as a stable system of rules, but as a lava lamp – it changes perpetually, he says, always morphing into some new form that emerges from the old one.

“Error” and Social Status

To make matters more complicated, this variability isn’t just historical:  there are lots of different versions of the language being used by different groups of people at any given moment, and some enjoy much greater privilege than others.  This causes what Maxine Hairston famously called “status-marking errors.”  In a well-known Writing Studies article called “Not All Errors are Created Equal,” Hairston points out that almost all professional class readers strongly object to the sentences “He brung his secretary with him” and “Him and Richards were the last ones hired,” even though no one misunderstands either.  

They just “sound” bad – or, more exactly, they affiliate their speakers with social groups that many people in privileged social positions pass judgment against.

Many have pointed out that these judgments about language are often connected with racism and class judgment, even if most people who pass them wouldn’t see themselves as overtly racist or classist.  Standard versions of the language aren’t called the “King’s English” for nothing:  what’s seen as “proper” English is, predictably, the language spoken by those with the greatest wealth, power, and prestige.  This is a very old story – and a dynamic that persists strongly.

But here’s the upside:  if grammar is a game with important social stakes, playing it well can have significant social and material benefits.  If your writing sounds polished, many readers – for better or worse, fair or unfair – will see you as smart, educated, even hardworking and reliable.  Avoiding double negatives and comma splices won’t make you smarter or a better person, but you may want to take advantage of the fact that many readers will see it this way, or at least that they'll see your willingness to conform as a sign that you’re being careful and want to be taken seriously.  

Register

There is a word grammarians and linguists use to help them sort out the complications of these kinds of variations in written forms of language:  register.  

Register refers to the variety of language seen as appropriate in different contexts.  

So can you begin a sentence with an "and" or a "but"?  Are fragments ok for effect?  That depends on what you're writing, where it will appear, and how you decide you want to strike readers.  Sentences beginning with conjunctions are fine in certain news features, but not in lab reports or legal briefs.  Well-placed fragments might well add some punch to an artist's gallery statement, but you might be taking a chance to include them in your philosophy paper.  That's register.

Sentence Structure

One more thing here too:  We also want to suggest that the sorts of error patterns we will describe in this section are by no means the only grammar issue readers will object to in your sentences.  In fact, they're not even the most important ones.  

"Grammar" also means how you pull your sentences together, joining phrases and clauses to make complex structures -- and this is a more complicated issue.  

There are some good books that help you think about this – we particularly like Joseph Williams's Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, for example – but this is much less about remembering specific rules than it is about tuning your ear to how sentences fit together.  It's a matter of fully actualizing what the linguist Noam Chomsky called "linguistic competence," everybody's intuitive understanding of the structures of the language they grow up speaking.  

It's why the writer Joan Didion, often praised as an elegant stylist, famously called grammar "a piano I play by ear."

Looking for specific ways to work on this?  More than anything else, we recommend lots and lots of reading and writing -- that's the best way to tune your ear to the rhythms of written language, as Didion suggests.  But we also recommend using your reading tactically as a resource for sentence models (that is, when you see sentences you like, use those structures in your own work), working hard to develop your ability to play and tinker with sentences (what will it sound like if I rephrase like this?), and working closely with a supportive mentor.  For mentors, think about your teachers, friends who you think write well, and tutors in the Writing Center, who will be more than happy to brainstorm ways to rephrase sentences with you.

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* Writing Studies scholar Mina Shaughnessy said this famously in her much-cited book, Errors and Expectations, about the underprepared writers she worked with at City University of New York in the 1970s.  She writes: "For the BW [Basic Writing] student, academic writing is a trap, not a way of saying something to someone.  The spoken language, looping back and forth between speakers, offering chances for groping and backing up and even hiding, leaving room for the langauge of hands and faces, of pitch and pauses, is generous and inviting.  Next to this rich orchestration, writring is but a line that moves haltingly across the page, exposing as it goes all that the writer doesn't know, then passing into the hands of a stranger who reads it with a lawyer's eyes, searching for flaws." (Shaughnessy 7)

** See Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene iii (our emphasis), for example: “What say you? can you love the gentleman?” 

*** See Othello, Act V, Scene ii (our emphasis), for example: “I know not where is that Promethean heat / That can thy light relume."

**** As William of Caxton, author of the first book published on a printing press in England, spelled the word in 1490.