Month: July 2012

Other Voices, Other Rooms

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The alert reader will have noticed by now that I quote, from time to time, “another writer — I don’t remember exactly which one.”  This isn’t so much due to absent-mindedness as to the fact that a lot of the people I hang out with, both in person and on the internet, are involved in some way with the writing and publishing trades, and all of them are in the habit of saying and writing clever things.

Generally speaking, if I can’t remember which of them said a particular thing, I look first at what you might call the usual suspects:

  • Sherwood Smith, fantasy novelist extraordinaire, who blogs regularly over at the Book View Cafe.
  • James D. Macdonald (aka Yog Sysop, aka Uncle Jim), who is one of the moderators and front page posters over at Making Light and a moderator and regular poster at Absolute Write.
  • Teresa Nielsen Hayden, another member of the Making Light blogging team.
  • All the instructors at Viable Paradise (when you have eight writers and editors and twenty-four students living cheek-by-jowl and laptop-by-netbook for a solid week, a lot of memorable things get said by a confusing number of people.)

If you want to read yet more stuff about writing and publishing, you could do worse than to check out the public online haunts of all of the above people.  They are, without exception, smart, sharp, and insightful.

It’s the Fourth of July…

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…and therefore, like every good freelancer, I’m working.

But in honor of the holiday, I won’t be working quite as much.

(To quote another writer of my acquaintance:  “Being a freelance novelist is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”)

A Second Set of Suspenders Wouldn’t be Too Much

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Or, Let’s Talk about Backups. Continue reading “A Second Set of Suspenders Wouldn’t be Too Much” →

Rules? In a Knife Fight?

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

The rules of grammar are not rules in the same sense that the rules of baseball, or chess, or tiddlywinks are rules. The latter are prescriptive: if you want to play those games, they describe how you must play them. (Note, however, that even rules of this sort allow for locally recognized variants.) Rules of grammar, however, are descriptive: they exist to set forth the range of utterances which can be made and understood by native speakers of a language. In that sense, “It’s me” is in fact grammatical — no native speaker of English is going to misunderstand what is meant by it.

Grammar, however, is not the same thing as usage, or as idiom, even though prescriptivist grammarians try to conflate the three. “It’s me” is colloquial usage, or casual written usage; “It is I” is formal written usage, in that a contemporary native speaker is highly unlikely to utter it in normal conversation. Similarly, “ain’t” is grammatical — a native speaker of English will understand what is meant by it — but in terms of usage it is at best colloquial, in addition to being strongly marked for region and class. A good teacher of English will make sure that his/her students are able to recognize and employ standard usage; a really good teacher of English will do so without stigmatizing his/her students’ own speech habits. There are not as many really good teachers of English as there should be.

“It’s me” is also an English idiom — idioms being those bits and bobs of a language that don’t fit into any of the standard tables at the back of the textbook, the ones where the instructor informs the class, grimly, that they’re just going to have to memorize those bits because they don’t make any regular sense. Every language has them: the fossilized snippets of extinct grammar, the vocabulary items borrowed whole from other sources and only halfway bashed into regularity, the words and phrases whose sound or meaning or function has shifted so far from the original that the logical connection has been severed.

Most of the time, when native speakers of a language complain about the grammar of other native speakers of a language, it’s actually their usage that’s being complained about — and thus, indirectly, their social or economic status.

Thought for the Day

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(For yesterday, actually, by now.  Oh, well.)

When writing extraordinary characters:  follow the default normal person in the story.

We meet Dr. Watson, the former army surgeon with the budget and housing problems, before we meet Sherlock Holmes the eccentric genius, even though meeting Holmes is the point of the exercise.