Grammar Wars

Grammar is changing. And it’s not just the Oxford comma (which you can pry from my work over my cold dead body). Scads of commas are disappearing from usage. Lately, I’ve seen Saturday December 31 everywhere. (It makes me want to grab a sharpie and add the comma between Saturday and December.) And then there are dialogue commas: “Aren’t you hungry Bob?” (Beep! Noun of direct address alert.) And what about interrupters like “however, of course, etc.” that aren’t offset with commas? I want to smack the advertisers/writers over the head with The Chicago Manual of Style.

In the last year or so, I started seeing these grammar faux pas more and more, even in books published by the big three houses. And a niggling suspicion started. So I asked a fellow grammar lover who also has been writing for a big six publisher for years about the grammar “mistakes.” She confirmed my suspicions, style sheets* were changing.

I want to rage against texting and ignorance, and I want to extol the importance of semi-colons. And not because I’m some Luddite grammar freak (which may be true, but isn’t the point). Good grammar promotes readability. And clarity. And shades of meaning. And will keep the zombie apocalypse at bay. (Oops, that was a little over the top. Sorry.)

Anyway, I’m thinking of starting The Grammar Board. It’ll be like the language academies that promote linguistic purity, but we’ll guard grammar purity... Except part of the reason I like English is its fluidity of expression, the way it responds to culture and change. Hmm. Maybe I’ll just stick to writing whiney blog posts.

*If you’re not familiar with style sheets, they’re “sheets” (booklets) that many publishers/newspapers/magazines give to their authors to keep the grammar (sometimes even politically charged word choice) consistent throughout their publication. 

Writing Style

Several writing friends and I have been discussing writing style. What it is, how it works, its difference from voice, etc. What precipitated the discussion was I’ve noticed that agents who have asked for fulls of my current novel are often those who have asked for fulls of my earlier novels. That might not sound unusual, but the genres I’ve submitted to these agents are very different—young adult, murder mystery, and literary fiction.  And it’s over a long period of time, so it’s not as if they remember my name. I’ve been pondering what it is that makes some literary agents consistently ask for my work and others not. (Note: And these agents are not those who ask for lots of submissions.)

One writing friend (Adele) mentioned that she’s always been taught that while voice can/should change from book to book, style does not. I think she’s right. Maybe that’s how computers identify the authors of those “anonymous” books—they analyze for style. According to M.H. Abrams (you know you’re a lit fantatic when his Glossary of Literary Terms is at your fingertips):

“Style is the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verse—it is how a speaker or writer says whatever it is that he says. The characteristic style of a work or a writer may be analyzed in term of its diction...its sentence structure and syntax; density and types of its figurative language; pattern of its rhythm, component sounds, and other formal features, and its rhetorical aims and devices.”

I suspect that the reason I’m more “successful” with certain agents is that, like all readers, agents have certain styles they enjoy reading. And certain ones that they don’t. That may explain why agents often turn down books that later end up on the NY Times best seller list. The style just didn’t work for them. And I guess that’s not surprising since we see this in classics all the time. Some people love James Joyce—though why they do is a mystery to me—and some people love F. Scott Fitzgerald.

One of the lessons to take from this (besides that you should query widely) is to keep records of which agents requested your work—they may be more likely to consider your next book. It also explains why query letters are so important. I’ve heard a lot of writers gripe that query letters are archaic and hard to write. But query letters are an opportunity too. A query letter is your chance to introduce an agent to your style. It’s a chance to see if your styles will mesh. And you really don’t want an agent who doesn’t “get” your style.

What about you all? What are your thoughts on style? What are your experiences querying multiple books—are they similar to mine?