I suck at grammar

Like the title states, I suck at grammar.
I'm hoping to find someone who can help me.

search online for "learn english grammar". There are plenty of options and some are free. Grammar is best learned by reading and writing.

If you read and hear broken grammar all day long, it's probably what you'll speak and write. Try to find good examples - people who speak well, famous authors who wrote well. I found reading last-century English authors - Lewis Carroll, Tolkein, Jonathan Swift, CS Lewis - helped me a lot as a kid. They seemed to take wordcraft very seriously. Americans not so much.

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Agree with HITD, above, that a good way to improve your grammar is to read a lot. I love English authors, but I don't agree that there are no American authors that attend to their wordcraft. The mid-20th century was a great period for American fiction, with many authors who had distinctive styles -- Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinback, Flannery O'Connor, E.B. White, Saul Bellow, etc. It was the golden age of noir and detective novels, and it was a great period for short stories, as well. You can learn a lot about writing by reading their works. And if you are an American author I think it's important to read American authors, because there are differences in the sensibilities of British and American authors. Plus, of course, there are a lot of differences in spelling. As an American you don't want to end up writing about "flavour" and "humour."

Put your prose out there, but don't be afraid to be corrected. If you can, take a class at a local college, and take all criticism as constructive. Hang out with people in your community whose language skills are good (ministers? book club members?), and implore them to correct you as often as you need correcting. It will be rough at first, but I think that it's the best way of knowing what your weaknesses are.

I've never recommended grammar checkers (not qualified, don't use them), but I'll pass on a recommendation. A friend of mine is a native Spanish speaker. She has a PhD from an American university. I did some editing of early drafts of her dissertation. She writes English well, I think.

She works in MS Word and leaves the grammar checker on. She doesn't trust everything Word green-lines as problematic. But she says she still learns things by researching the questionable areas. Many times, her green-line text is grammatically correct, but often she finds a better way to say it.

It couldn't hurt to follow her advice. Let the grammar checker point out potential problems, but don't take them as the last word or even correct! Research it yourself. In the process you'll discover a better way to say what you want to say.

rj

The antidote to sucking at grammar if you want to write is to do a little studying so that you know the basics yourself. You don't have to master everything in your brain--just have resources you can use and go to them when you want to check something. There are basic guides out there, including ones that I go to frequently.

I recommend the "Schaum's Theory and Problems" series; I use Punctuation, Capitalization, and Spelling by Eugene Ehrilich.

The "HarperCollins College Outline" series; I use English Grammar by David and Barbara Daniels.

The American Heritage Book of English Usage.

All are written in readable/clear English.

There's no substitute for doing some study of grammar, though, like using an "editor" here, you don't know what's good guidance if you don't have some idea yourself what good grammar would be.

rjordan said:

It couldn't hurt to follow her advice. Let the grammar checker point out potential problems, but don't take them as the last word or even correct! Research it yourself. In the process you'll discover a better way to say what you want to say.

rj

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I do something similar; I turn grammar and spelling check as I type off, but run spelling and grammar between drafts to spot potential problems.

I've learned a few things in the process.

Names Matter: For example, naming a character Ford can confuse a grammar check because the word 'Ford' can be different parts of speech depending on context.

Punctuation Matters: A missing punctuation mark will cause faults that can be hard to decipher.

Spelling matters: Obviously if grammar check can't recognize a word it's going to parse your writing incorrectly. Make sure the spelling and grammar are set to the English rules you're using. (MSWord has several varieties of English to choose from.)

Grammar check (at least in MSWord) is configurable: The default setting for Word's grammar check is for gender-neutral, politically-correct, formal business correspondence. That causes a lot of faults that have no bearing on writing good fiction. The only other grammar checker I've tried was the same. If you don't reconfigure your grammar checker to suit your preferences and style, it is going to lead you into a very boring and stilted style of fiction.

I don't know of any way to make Word's grammar check accept long, complex sentences without turning the check for run-on sentences off completely. Personally, I need that and the Passive Voice check, so I put up with the false positives.

There are places where some of the hints are illustrated.
https://www.grammarcheck.net/writing-mistakes-everyone-makes/

The site has a great many 'infographics' which may help a bit more.

Weird Harold said:

I don't know of any way to make Word's grammar check accept long, complex sentences without turning the check for run-on sentences off completely. Personally, I need that and the Passive Voice check, so I put up with the false positives.

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My friend writes academic papers and such so there's a high percentage of specialized jargon and unadulterated bullshit. MS Word grammar check doesn't have a bullshit detector that I know of, so I'm not sure how that affects it's green-lining decisions.

I forwarded your full comments to her. She might be unaware of them. It could be useful to her. She has found the grammar checker useful to a point.

rj

Handley_Page said:

There are places where some of the hints are illustrated.
https://www.grammarcheck.net/writing-mistakes-everyone-makes/

The site has a great many 'infographics' which may help a bit more.

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I looked at a couple of the Infographics on this blog and they were presented in an interesting way.

Then I tried the Grammar Check and it led me to Grammarly, a browser-based grammar checker. I installed it (free version) and ran two submitted stories through it. It found a couple of embarrassing errors and half a dozen simple errors that I should have seen.

In fact, now that it's installed, it is checking this very post in real time. The free version certainly finds mistakes that were more typos than a lack of knowing better. For those who are spelling and grammar challenged, I think it would be a useful tool for that price. The free version would be enough for writing Lit stories.

Let's check: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. There ya go; should work fine for Lit.

The payware version is a subscription service costing upwards of $100/year. If you write professionally without access to a professional copy editor, it would probably be worthwhile. On the other hand, if your professional work isn't worth a professional editor, it probably doesn't really matter.

rj

rjordan said:

Grammarly, a browser-based grammar checker.

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Installed it briefly, but ultimately chased it off my system. It might rock for business writing but it objects to every idiomatic usage, and freaks out over colloquial writing. I spent too much time telling it to shut up. Maybe for ESL folk it's heaven-sent, but I can't imagine using it for storytelling. My characters are English As She Is Spoke people for the most part.

HandsInTheDark said:

Installed it briefly, but ultimately chased it off my system. It might rock for business writing but it objects to every idiomatic usage, and freaks out over colloquial writing. I spent too much time telling it to shut up. Maybe for ESL folk it's heaven-sent, but I can't imagine using it for storytelling. My characters are English As She Is Spoke people for the most part.

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Likewise. These programs are ok for fundamental "grammar 101" stuff and finding my stupid, lazy-ass mistakes, but I sure wouldn't rely on them for much more than that. I guess I'm lucky, thirty years of business writing on top of a liberal arts degree and thousands of books read in a lifetime, the basics are ingrained - some things eventually sink in

sr71plt said:

The anecdote to sucking at grammar if you want to write is to do a little studying so that you know the basics yourself. You don't have to master everything in your brain--just have resources you can use and go to them when you want to check something. There are basic guides out there, including ones that I go to frequently.

I recommend the "Schaum's Theory and Problems" series; I use Punctuation, Capitalization, and Spelling by Eugene Ehrilich.

The "HarperCollins College Outline" series; I use English Grammar by David and Barbara Daniels.

The American Heritage Book of English Usage.

All are written in readable/clear English.

There's no substitute for doing some study of grammar, though, like using an "editor" here, you don't know what's good guidance if you don't have some idea yourself what good grammar would be.

Click to expand...

Did you read the first line of your post?

rjordan said:

...grammar checker useful to a point.

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That pretty much sums up grammar checking by a program.

Boxlicker101 said:

Did you read the first line of your post?

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Apparently not. I have flailed against autocorrect here and there, though.

As Joan Didion once said: ‘Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.’

I suggest that you will learn more about the effective use of grammar by listening to / reading careful writers than you will by reading How-To books.

Just reading prose isn't going to give a writer a basic understanding of the "why" of grammar. Until you understand the "why" (and because English is an amalgam, the existence and applicability of exceptions), you haven't mastered grammar and you can only understand whatever specific examples you have already encountered can remember--you can't navigate through the writing with confidence.

Can't be avoided. If you want to be a competent writer, you have to put in some time and effort to learn the basics of the craft.

And you might find it worthwhile to check out "The Elements of Grammar" by Margaret Shertzer. It's put out by the same publishers of "The Elements of Style" and "The Elements of Editing" and many people have found it helpful.

rjordan said:

Grammarly, a browser-based grammar checker. I installed it (free version) and ran two submitted stories through it. It found a couple of embarrassing errors and half a dozen simple errors that I should have seen.

Click to expand...

Grammarly is a good one to use.

jehoram said:

And you might find it worthwhile to check out "The Elements of Grammar" by Margaret Shertzer. It's put out by the same publishers of "The Elements of Style" and "The Elements of Editing" and many people have found it helpful.

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I have this one, too, and I agree it's good, in part because it's short, and therefore not intimidating.

I agree with the point made earlier that some study of grammar for itself is necessary if you really want to master the rules of writing. It really does not take that much time to review the essential rules of grammar in a short book like Shertzer's.