Grammar

I love grammar. I know I probably just lost half of my audience after making that statement, but bear with me. We’re all dorks about something. We know way more than a normal human being should about a particular topic and have become a total nerd in that area. Some people are into Star Trek, creating the quintessential nerd, the Trekkie, but we all do it. Those around me are Jeep nerds, bike dorks, farm geeks…..and on and on. I am a word nerd. I love word origins, grammar, comma splices, dangling modifiers, oh my goodness, the list just goes on….

So when I signed up for the Elements of Grammar course at USU, I thought I’d be a kid in a candy shop. Daily doses of subject-verb agreement, visions of prepositional phrases, rounds with peers about comma splices and simple or complex sentence structures. But alas, this was not how the first two weeks of class unraveled.

The first day of class was the usual welcome to class, handing out the syllabus, blah, blah, blah. The first assignment was determining subjects and verbs. Easy.

The NEXT class period, however, was a disaster.

You’d think that the first week of a college grammar class full of English majors would be pretty much heartburn free. Again…alas. A simple assignment of labeling pronouns, nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives and prepositions turned in to a frustrating, painful debate. These English majors, these lovers of the language, could do nothing but say hateful things about the language they were planning on spending the rest of their lives using. They plan to sell their ability to know their stuff about writing, but can only complain about the simple mechanics.

Talk about heartbreaking.

Even after explaining the reasoning behind a word being an adjective instead of a pronoun, several students would say things such as “That’s just dumb” or “Why should I care?”

Why should you care about grammar? Because it matters.

When I see a bridge, or a building, or a car, or something that bunches of engineers spent hours pouring over, getting the calculations just right, I don’t think to myself, “wow, a lot of math went in to that.” I think, “Beautiful.” But imagine seeing a bridge where someone didn’t care about the math…It would fall, it wouldn’t line up with the road, it’d be too short, and it’d be UGLY. The same goes with English. If someone doesn’t care, it’s ugly. Think of how many times that applies in life….

If someone doesn’t care, it’s ugly.