Good Golly Grammar

Let’s eat Grandma!
Let’s eat, Grandma!

Yes, we’ve all seen this meme about the importance of the comma. Poor
Grandma looks torn between running for the hills or serving up her famous chicken
potpie with a smile. It’s funny and makes quite a few of us teachers laugh. But it also
makes a point, and that is that grammar is a fading star under the bright lights of English
education.

I get it. I’m a teacher, and I can tell you that students care not one whit whether
their commas are in the right place, whether their verb tense is consistent, or whether
they’ve varied their sentence lengths enough to be interesting. Only recently was the
Oxford comma vindicated (and boy, did I celebrate!). Teenagers text and Snapchat and
emoji everything. Grammar is a foreign concept where they are concerned.
Unfortunately, however, clean grammar speaks volumes about a business. It can
mean a whole grade letter’s difference on a college essay. It can even distract the
reader from enjoying an otherwise enjoyable story. Clean grammar is essential to
success.

At least as far as I’m concerned.
I am one of those people—the one who spots every little mistake on posters and
flyers, on social media, in pamphlets, and in novels. I can’t help it. After all, I am an
English teacher. It comes with the territory. But it has also been a part of who I am as a
person for as long as I can remember. English has always been my strength.

Vocabulary and grammatical correctness come easily to me. Mental editing is a daily
exercise of mine, and yet I do it without much conscious thought. As an Indie writer, I
expect nothing less than perfection in my work. Combing through a manuscript and
looking for every little typo, misused punctuation, misspelled word, and overused word
is an absolute must for me. Not every Indie writer does this, and I really feel as though it
gives what otherwise might be an “A” read a “C” rating. (The teacher in me never
sleeps.) I have seen students actually cry over the fact that they spent a whole week
working on what they felt was their best paper ever, only to receive a whole letter grade
off for bad grammar. And I do not trust business that cannot use an apostrophe
correctly. Period.

The point is grammar matters. It always has. At the end of the day, it can mean
the difference between having your Grandma for lunch or having lunch with your
Grandma. I know which one I prefer.