100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Mentor Series) (12 page)

BOOK: 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Mentor Series)

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1. Respect the Rules of Grammar

2. Do Not Change Tenses

3. Know How to Use the Possessive Case

4. Make Verbs Agree With Their Subjects

5. Avoid Dangling Modifiers

6. Avoid Shifts in Pronoun Forms

7. Avoid Splitting Infinitives

8. Avoid These Common Mistakes

9. Be Sensitive to Changes in the Language

10. Prefer Good Writing to Good Grammar

1. Respect the Rules of Grammar

To succeed as a writer, you must respect the rules of grammar. If editors or teachers have consistently found grammatical errors in your writing, the flaw in your work is not minor. It is fatal. Good writing and good grammar are not twins, but they are usually found in the same place.

The rules of grammar exist to help you write well, not to sabotage your work, and you cannot write well without them. The rules of grammar organize the language just as the rules of arithmetic organize the world of numbers. Imagine how difficult math would be if three and three equaled six only once in a while or if a tenth was equal to ten percent only when somebody felt like it. Grammatical rules about tense, gender, number, person, and case provide us with a literary currency that we can spend wherever English is spoken or read. Grammar is a system of rules for speaking and writing a given language, and that system was not created just so that English teachers would have something to harass you about. It exists so that we can communicate well, and when you blatantly violate portions of the system, you are chipping away at the stability of the whole.

While you should accept the fact that changes do occur in the language, you should also resist each change every step of the way. Change should not come easily. New words and constructions seeking entry into the language should be met by a mighty army of grammarians saying, “It’s wrong,” and the rest of us saying, “It just doesn’t sound right,” so that the trendy, the senseless, and the merely pretty fall dead on the battlefield, and only the truly valuable survive. Change, if I might switch my metaphor, should come gradually and rarely, or the language will fall like a table that has all its legs removed at once instead of replaced one at a time.

2. Do Not Change Tenses

If you begin to write in one tense, you should not switch to another.

3. Know How to Use the Possessive Case

Most nouns are made possessive by adding
’s: The dog’s paws, a child’s toy, the ocean’s beauty.
However, if a noun ends in
s
already and is plural, simply add an apostrophe:
The dogs’ paws,
A singular noun ending in s may be made possessive either way:
The actress’s role/The actress’ role.

When joint possession is being shown, the
’s
usually is added only to the last member of the series:
June and Jane’s mother is coming to lunch.
However, if what is possessed is not identical, each noun in the series should have
’s: June’s and Jane’s teachers are coming to lunch.

With compound nouns, the ’s is added to the final word:

My mother-in-law’s house is spotless.

The Queen of England’s dogs kept barking.

The personal pronoun it does not use an apostrophe in its possessive form:

4. Make Verbs Agree With Subjects

Plural subjects require plural verbs; singular subjects require singular verbs. When writing a long or complicated sentence, check to make certain your verb agrees in number with its subject.

5. Avoid Dangling Modifiers

A dangling modifier is a word or group of words that appears to modify an inappropriate word in the same sentence. The error occurs most often when passive rather than active verbs are used.