GrammarThe bad news for those who dislike grammar or believe that they do not know any grammar is that, for better or worse, nobody who wishes to write and be understood, let alone write and be considered something of a stylist, can be wholly unconcerned with grammar and usage. Grammar provides the logical framework without which communication in any language would be well nigh impossible. You might think that grammar was a product of more sophisticated ages, and that older and "more primitive" languages would be grammatically simpler. This is not the case. In fact, the very opposite is true of the grammar of at least one modern European language, which has become progressively less complex over the centuries. That language is English. The users of the earliest form of our language—Old English, or Anglo-Saxon—had to cope with a system of different cases for nouns and complicated suffixes to show the tenses and persons of verbs that later ages have entirely dispensed with.It is worth considering for a moment why people who were living a life that was far simpler and more primitive than ours, and had far narrower intellectual horizons, should have developed methods of communication that were complicated and subtle and demanded considerable powers of memory—or so it would seem to anyone who has tried to learn a heavily inflected language, whether an ancient one such as Latin or a modern one like German. We can only guess at what the reasons were. It seems reasonable to suppose that they were very eager to establish what precisely the relations were between the different words that they used and thus between the different people and things that they talked about in their everyday conversation. It seems equally reasonable to suppose that, for them, as native speakers of the languages in question, the efforts of memory involved were less than they are for us as outsiders when we attempt to learn those same languages.No Grammar, No CommunicationWe can draw two lessons from these assumptions. The first is that we ought to be equally concerned about making absolutely clear the relationships between the words we use and between the people and things we talk about. If we do not know any grammar, we cannot do so. This fact can be easily demonstrated.The sequence of words gone fishing back soon love Ted scrawled on a piece of paper would be immediately understandable to the person for whom the note was intended or to any English-speaking person who happened to pick it up and read it. It looks ungrammatical and it is unpunctuated, but the person who wrote it had a basic grasp of English grammar and expected the reader to have a similar grasp and to understand that he was merely omitting certain words and punctuation marks for the sake of brevity. On the basis of that shared knowledge, everything the writer omitted, the reader could immediately supply. If the note had read fishing gone soon love Ted back, however, the link with basic grammar would have been broken. In the first instance the missing elements are obvious [I have] gone fishing[. I will be] back soon[. L]ove[,] Ted. In the second, there is no implicit grammatical structure and it is not at all obvious what the relationships between the words are supposed to be, so it is impossible to fill in the gaps.What is true of the second "note" cited in the previous paragraph is equally true of the even simpler sequence Ted Nigel hit. In a language such as Latin it would be immediately clear who had hit whom because one of the names would be in the nominative case (and therefore the subject of the verb) and one of the names would be in the accusative case (and therefore the object of the verb) and no matter the order in which you wrote down the three words, it would always be clear who was the aggressor and who was the victim. In English the word order for a standard sentence is subject followed by verb followed by object: Ted hit Nigel or Nigel hit Ted. Every English speaker knows this whether the previous sentence with its references to subjects and objects makes any sense to him or her. That is the point and the second lesson to be learned from the assumptions made above about the relationship of the earliest speakers of English to their language. Just as the Anglo-Saxons probably imbibed the complexities of their language with their mothers' milk, so we internalize the comparatively simple grammatical patterns of modern English as part and parcel of the childhood process of learning to speak. A very small child will say want cookie rather than cookie want. In doing so, the child goes through essentially the same procedure as the adult who says gone fishing and not fishing gone—and demonstrates just as certainly that he or she, at some level, knows basic grammar.We need to know grammar in order to speak and to communicate the simplest needs, let alone to write stylishly. There is no question about that. The real questions, perhaps, are Do we need to know the refinements of grammar and usage? and Do we need to know the standard vocabulary that writers use to describe the operations that we carry out instinctively in our everyday use of English?The Tools of the TradeThe answer to both the questions posed at the end of the previous paragraph is a slightly qualified yes. The qualifications arise from the fact that it is perfectly possible that someone would be able to write adequately, or even take the literary world by storm, without being able to explain the difference between an adverb and an adjective. Just as it is possible to be a gifted musician without being able to read music, so it is possible for someone to be hailed as a literary genius simply on the basis of the use that he or she makes of English that has been assimilated purely by listening and reading.That said, wild untutored geniuses who stagger the critics and put their expensively educated contemporaries to shame are comparatively rare. They are the exceptions that prove the general rule. Shakespeare—"warbl[ing] his native woodnotes wild," according to John Milton, and knowing "small Latin and less Greek," according to Ben Jonson—is sometimes presented as the prime example in English literature of the simple country boy who came to town and beat the city slickers at their own game. This, however, is a myth. Shakespeare was well educated, even though he did not attend university, and was certainly canny enough to learn from his university-educated contemporaries before he tried to surpass them. More to the point perhaps, wild untutored geniuses who are asked to produce company reports or make presentations to important clients are probably even rarer. Fewer allowances are made for ordinary people with more average talents. They are expected to possess basic knowledge to make up for their lack of exceptional gifts.We all can get so far on our native wit, but there usually comes a time when we sense that something we have written feels wrong and want to know what is wrong and how we can rectify it. Or maybe someone else criticizes a sentence that we have written and asks us to justify the use of a certain word in a certain place. It makes it much easier to enter into a discussion on language matters either with ourselves or with other people if we know the ins and outs of the subject.Let us approach this topic from a slightly different angle. You would expect a carpenter to be familiar with the kinds of wood that are suitable for various tasks, with the tools of the trade, and with the names of the various joints, supports, surfaces, and so on that he or she might need to build a structure. Some of the vocabulary used by the carpenter in the course of his or her work might be unfamiliar to the ordinary layperson but is essential to the conduct of the business. A writer uses language most of the time as the carpenter uses wood. Language is the writer's basic construction material. At the same time, there is an array of linguistic and literary technical language that constitutes the writer's terms of art. This specialized language is crucial to the conduct of the writer's business, too, if he or she takes the business at all seriously. A writer who cannot tell an adverb from an adjective, the subject of a verb from its object, or a colon from a semicolon perhaps does not know the proper use of any of them and is a bit like a carpenter who cannot tell a hammer from a chisel. Would you buy a table from such a person?In immediate practical terms, it will make it much easier to understand some of the analysis undertaken later in this book, if you are familiar with the basic terminology of grammar. Although the rules of grammar are not part of the subject matter, grammatical issues crop up from time to time when matters of style are being discussed, and the relevant technical vocabulary is used. So, as the reader will have noted, the slightly qualified yes given at the beginning of this subsection is in reality an unqualified yes.Artist's LicenseTraditionally, artists have been allowed to bend the rules somewhat in order to achieve some special effect or capture some impression or sensation that refuses to be kept within normal bounds—"to snatch a grace beyond the reach of art," as the poet Alexander Pope put it in "An Essay on Criticism" (1711). Indeed they have.Artist's license, or artistic license, seems to take us immediately into the area beyond correctness that is the stomping ground for this chapter. Most critics would agree that it is justifiable to ignore the normal rules of grammar and usage in the pursuit of a higher objective. But what constitutes a higher objective and how far does the license extend?In the first canto, stanza XCIII of his epic Don Juan (1819–24), Lord Byron wrote:If you think 'twas philosophy that this did;
I can't help thinking puberty assisted. We allow the distortion of normal word order (and the hobbledehoy rhythm) in the interests of rhyme and humor. Poets, especially rhyming poets, are allowed a lot of scope. Prose writers, however, are generally expected to be less wayward.A writer talks about pictures in the newspaper of union bosses attending a meeting abroad that showed them living the high life and generally looking "pretty decadent," and then adds the comment: "Evidentially they didn't know they were being photographed." The same writer, a little later, reports that a woman artist was arrested for breaking and entering and concludes the anecdote by saying: "Her defense was that she was an artist and that the act was performance art and, incredulously, the charges against her were dropped." Housebreaker artists are obviously afforded even greater license than poets, but our first instinct would surely be to query the writer. Shouldn't the first sentence read "Evidently they didn't know …" and the second "and, incredibly, the charges …"? When you learn that the writer in question is Bob Dylan in his book Chronicles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. 66), you may pause again and think: "This man is a great artist; it's more likely that I'm wrong, and he's using these words in an interesting new way."If Bob Dylan takes liberties with English in his songs, few people are likely to complain. If he takes liberties with English in his prose autobiography, few people are likely to complain either, for few are likely to be reading it for the purity of his style. But there are, we might say, more grounds for complaint in the latter case. (In fairness to Dylan it should be pointed out that the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary gives "incredible" as one sense of incredulous, but not everyone would approve of this usage.)The upshot is that literary artist's license is more likely to be granted to a writer of poetry than of prose, is more likely to be granted to an artist with an established reputation than to a beginner, and may have a place in creative writing sometimes, but has no place at all in writing of the ordinary workday kind. If you depart from established practice, it is far more likely that people will think you have made a mistake than that you are pushing the boundaries of the expressible. If clarity is your aim—and, ordinarily, it should be your primary aim—then stick to what will be understood by other people. Take heart from the fact that almost everything that needs to be said and is worth saying can be said in a way that does not need a special dispensation from the normal rules.
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