ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Now this really is a subject that really that gets right up my back. Why is it necessary to write a story in perfect English grammar, when most of the population in the UK would never know English grammar if it hit them in the face? Those that do talk it are looked upon as trying to be something they are not. With comments from the majority like, “Listen to him/her with their airs and graces.”

Walk along an English street in any big town and ask a direction or a question of a passer-by. Most will give you sentences with mms and errs, mixed with the local dialect that leave you wishing you had not bothered asking in the first place. In some cases after hearing the answer you can only scratch your head in a state of confusion. It’s at that point you wonder if when you walked out of the last shop you stepped through a time warp, and are now on doppelganger planet. However, very few people of any age will answer you in plain English, and even less of them will answer using English grammar.

STONEHENGE

Take the music industry and ask yourself, when was the last time you heard a song that was being sung with English Grammar in mind? Yea right, let’s move on. Take Rap for instance, a series of words spoken at speed with music thrown in to make it sell. As yet I have not heard a Rapping song/whatever that sounds remotely like the way we talk or the way we read. Then how do we expect our children that have been at school for the best part of eleven to fourteen years to speak or write properly?

My first school was in 1952 and a junior school, and from that day forward my education was abysmal. It started in a dip where I lay for ten years while the basics in education bounced off of my imagination. I was twelve years old and there were far too many things to learn. Did I really want to know how to make a fire extinguisher in science? Could I make one in time to put out a raging fire in an emergency, and where would I find all of these tubes and glasses?

WIDECOMBE IN THE MOOR

Dennis redfield

I was pulled out of a dream one morning in the middle of a lesson by the history teacher, “Johnstone, when did the Normans arrive in England?”

I focused my eyes once more as I scratched my head before I looked around the room. The entire class was looking back at me waiting for an answer. I replied with conviction, “It must have been last week, Sir, when I was not at school.”

The class burst out laughing while the teacher banged his forehead on the desk. While he was going through this self inflicted pain his hand was pointing to the door. I stood up behind my desk to follow the pointing finger. I then walked to the classroom door before stepping through it into the corridor. The sun was shining so I went home and went fishing on the lake all day. It was not until the next day that the same teacher told me, “I only wanted you to stand outside the door until the end of the lesson. You never learned a thing yesterday.”

I was going to tell him that I never caught any fish either, but decided it might be to much information.

There were so many useless subjects being pushed inside my head that there was no room for the ones that mattered, English literature, English grammar, mathematics. There was never a correction for a wrong spelling, just the red line denoting it was wrong. It was marked that way I suppose, so that the twelve year old student would go and find out the correct way to spell it. Let’s see now, where was the only dictionary in the school? Yes in the school library with one major problem. The school library is out of bounds to all except during reading lessons.

WASTWATER LAKE DISTRICT

Alan Cleaver

Now here I am on a Monday eager to find out why my essay has had the word “FORREST” marked wrong. I was still wondering [or maybe not] when the bell rang at four in the afternoon. Telling me that I can give my tired little brain a rest and go home, and forget school. I had no homework, because in those years some of the teachers were as lazy as the students they were teaching. When I get home that night, school was just a memory. The sun is out and it’s free time. If the teachers could not be bothered to teach me the correct way to spell the word “FOREST” while in the classroom, then I can assure you all that there was not a chance in hell I would learn it at home sitting on the river bank fishing.

Over the past fifty years I have taught myself to write stories of my fantasies and imagination. I have learned to spell words correctly while teaching myself history and mythology. The computer and the www taught me geography which helps me in most of my stories. To be honest I have taught myself to write by reading other authors stories.

Now I have another person telling me that my grasp of English grammar is not to his way of thinking. You don’t say. Yes I am once again talking about editors. I am not going to disagree with him because he is correct. I write as I think and talk and I don't talk like the book of grammar. No one has yet  told me that I don’t talk correct. No one has ever told me that they could not understand what I am talking about. I have held my own in conversations with teachers, lawyers, priests, and business men that were talking no different than me. 

Watch a film on television. Apart from the dated films, how many people speak grammatically correct as they do in the written story? I will leave you with these my thoughts for the moment, but I am not finished on this subject, not by a long way.

Be well Ian