SVO and Tinsel

 

SVO and Tinsel

What’s your position on ending a sentence with a preposition, grammar others might be afraid of? What non-grammatical writing styles do you firmly support?

We’re talking about one of the “Rules” today and, like Groucho Marx as Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff in Horse Feathers, ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it.’

 

In my mind, Rules imply obedience, and conformity, and ‘I’m against it.’

 

When I think of rules applied to language, I think of grammar. When I think of rules applied to storytelling, I think of other writers. I analyze the writers I admire for what they did, how they did it, and maybe why they got away with it.

 

The funny thing about RULES is they tell you what not to do. Nobody tells you How to do X, Y, or Z, which is why I think self-help books are a uniquely American phenomenon. We obey all kinds of rules, but forget why they exist. In a word, most people don’t know how to think. I daresay writers do, or they try. Hence, my use of a Yoda meme.

Writers can talk shop and can make the act of writing sound amazing, like Prospero conjuring a spell, or monotonous as hell. It is and it isn’t. Writing is fun. Language is meant to communicate. Look, you really only need a few hundred words in any language to find food, the bathroom, medical help, and other basic necessities. It’s a functional existence, and understanding grammar is as haphazard as a child’s grasp; it’s the life of an immigrant explorer. Nobody cares if you got IT right or not, if you get your point across. It’s a different matter if you’re the face that meets the customer. There is the other extreme, of knowing all the words, but not knowing when to use the right one, or how to string them together.

 

You may call that elusive magic Talent, but I call it decades of reading other writers, observing Life around you, plus your own quirky relationship with language. The latter is what readers and writers call Voice, and the academics call Style. Grammar is learned in the past; it’s in the rear-view mirror. All these Rules is like learning how to drive: think about it all at once, and you’d never move yourself out of P for Park, or Paralysis.

 

The fundamentals of the English sentence filter down to Subject-Verb-Object, around which the author can hang a lot of tinsel. Adjectives, clauses, etc. Then there is the music that the grammar rules forget. English prose has rhythms, but iambic pentameter is the most natural one to the ear. If you don’t know it, then use this quote from Pete Hamill: ‘Lyonnaise potatoes and some pork chops, Lyonnaise potatoes and some pork chops.’

 

We cite DO and DON’Ts when we talk about writing when we aren’t writing. Unless they’re egregious and defeat comprehension, we forget grammar because we read for Effect. Nobody is hung in effigy because they ended a sentence with a preposition. We discuss how a sentence made us feel, or how it acted or didn’t in service of the story. For example, the grammarian might fidget at the lack of commas and grammatically incorrect sentences within “Tiger Bites” from Lucia Berlin, but to insert all the proper punctuation might decimate her vivid portrait of El Paso, Texas.

 

The rules of grammar act as guideposts because, like life, what shouldn’t work, often does. Dickens and Faulkner were masters of run-on sentences. Compare most sentences from Henry James with Hemingway, and you see a profound difference in style. Where James was baroque, Hemingway was spare. Go and compare sentences from Breslin with Ellroy and you’ll see they both use a staccato style. It’s all SVO and tinsel. Style and themes are a matter of personal preference or aesthetics. How it was said might thrill you, or leave you dismayed, offended, but you admire the insult and the delivery. Writers who break the rules make our reading interesting.

 

About ending a sentence with a preposition…Conversation is almost never grammatically correct. There are Um, and Ah in daily speech. Filler words fill the void until the next neuron fires. People talk in fragments. A person at a party who never uses contractions is grammatically correct, but comes across as stiff and pretentious. Writers who write great dialog exhibit Flow. The reader’s eyes work down the page, never losing the thread of what is said or the subtext (not said), and who is speaking. Prepositions communicate relationships, location and time. In dialogue, there is context for prepositions. In the simplest terms, to drop a preposition sounds more natural to the ear.

 

‘Where are you going to?’ sounds weird compared to ‘Where are you going?’

 

It’s also matter of register. Storytelling is intimate, between a writer and a reader. Proper grammar is for formal communication. We can use ain’t in a story but not in an email to the boss. Follow all the rules, and your work is competent, serviceable, but it probably isn’t memorable.

 

Readers enjoy writers who communicate well. They remember writers who tell a universal story in a superlative way, think within the lines or devastate them with the unexpected. Readers remember writers who alter their emotional experiences of a story.