Good grammar is alive and well in the real world and you will be judged for it.
We all have that one friend who takes great pleasure in correcting our grammar. They see nothing wrong with setting us straight about the way something should be said. “Actually,” they’ll say with snobbish authority, “You couldn’t care less.”
Time travel. You’re back in Mrs. Keefer’s freshman English class. She’s lecturing you about your wanton use of dangling participles and misplaced modifiers. You tell yourself not to be concerned about it because you’ll never have to worry about sentence diagrams and grammar out in the real world.
Now you’re staring at a grant application on the computer screen in front of you. This is important. You have to mean what you say. There’s a very real chance that the competency of your entire organization will be decided by your inability to remember when and why to capitalize a pronoun.
Your BFF may not care that about indiscriminate use of “your” when you mean “you’re.” They’re also not a position to bestow your organization with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What is grammar, anyway?
The problem with much of what we are taught in school is that our teachers don’t bother to explain why it’s important to know the difference between such phrases as “benefit from” and “benefit by.” As a teen, it’s completely unrelatable. But a foundation that grants millions of dollars to organizations is going to want to know that grown-up-you can make that distinction.
Maybe it would have been helpful if Mrs. Keefer had worked in a few real-world examples. At the very least, she could have explained the advantages of knowing the system and structure of language. “Ignorance of the law,” we are told, “is no excuse.” It may be true, but it doesn’t make it any less shocking when we’re arrested for something we didn’t even know was illegal.
Abusing the rules of grammar is no different. It’s all about perspective. You won’t be found guilty by a jury of your peers, and sentenced to hard labor. You may, however, be judged as unprofessional and not worthy of a foundation grant.
Big deal. Grammar is dead.
The Internet killed it. Practically every other Facebook post says “your” instead of “you’re.” Usage of the Oxford comma is about as common as a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. Language is evolutionary. You have to use the lexicon of your audience to be accepted and understood. Stick that in your meme pipe and smoke it.
Bravo. It’s a well-constructed argument. Most of the people in your world won’t expect you to know the difference between a homonym and a homophone—or even a homograph, for that matter. All it takes, though, is one person who knows and cares. Like the person who will read and decide to approve your grant application.
It’s not as if they’re expecting you to communicate to them in a foreign language. It’s a language you should know how to write. Sometimes it can be a bit tricky. But, there’s an easy way to avoid incorrect usage.
Say it a different way.
Even Mrs. Keefer wouldn’t expect you to remember all the rules all these years later. She’d likely tell you to follow the advice of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.:
“As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. ‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story ‘Eveline’ is just this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.
“Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and earth’.”
Mrs. Keefer would also tell you to seek out a professional to review your work. We can help with that Grant writing is all we do. Maybe it’s time our paths crossed.
