The Real Importance Of Grammar
I hated English lessons at school. I’d been speaking to other human beings for many years (12) so why was it they thought we all suddenly needed instructing on how to perform this age old in-built human activity?
Take writing for example. I’d been doing that forever too! I’d never had a big misunderstanding because of words I’d written on a page, so where was the need to start making every sentence perfect and all punctuation ace?
I couldn’t get my head around any of it. If the cave painters of eons past hadn’t bothered, why did our generation have to change the rules?
Then, one day, my teacher – Ms. Barnnaples I believe she was called, and she was a very old woman, all of twenty-nine terrible years of age – took me to one side and said “Jacob, we need to talk about your spelling and grammar and unique use of punctuation.”
By unique she meant shocking, of course.
Ms. Barnnaples then went on a wild and wicked rampage. A rampage of technical wisdom that left no grammatical beast of mine alive and able to continue being used. Not to mention that not even the best excavators could dig up a reasoning to my use of the semicolon. By the end of that conversation (followed by a stern talking to from the Headmaster about why full-stops were a necessary evil) I was beginning to catch her drift: If I was going to get along in this world without alienating every single person I came in to contact with, I was going to have to work within the same rigid grammatical parameters as everyone else.
Which was a pain.
But slowly it happened. Over time grammar became less my enemy and more my friend. It was a nasty, sometimes harsh and belittling friend, granted, but it was also an educational friend. And, indeed, a friend for life.
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