People. Language is important. It allows us to communicate complex ideas and opinions clearly and concisely. It lets us read and write. Properly used, language is pretty awesome. Improperly used, it can lead to cannibalism.
Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are the building blocks of our written language. These are the basic tools everybody needs in order to communicate effectively. Use them wrong, and your message gets garbled. Ideas get miscommunicated. Emails go to your boss instead of your best friend. Etc. If you're a writer, or want to be one, grammar, punctuation, and spelling should be the very first things you master. Without those tools, who gives a fuck if your heroine is the prettiest, your plot is the most action-packed, and your character arc is the most dynamic? Nobody, because nobody can bloody read your story to understand these things.
I'm infuriated by the idea that, in writing, intent is more important than good grammar. That as a reader, I should have to work out for myself what you're trying to say. Um, no. If you cannot convey your ideas through clearly written English, something is wrong. You need to brush up your skills. You can't turn around and say that the odd dropped comma or misspelling doesn't matter, because the reader figured it out in the end, right? This is not okay.
Why? Lots of reasons! Firstly, we're not talking about anything ridiculously unachievable here. Modern technology has provided us with online dictionaries, thesauri, spellcheckers, and grammar checkers. If you're using a computer, you've got no excuses for not double checking something before you post it online for the world to see. The technology is there to back you up, for God's sake. If you're dyslexic, there are online tools and resources to help with that too. There are any number of books available to teach you proper grammar if you need it.
Secondly, it is your job as a writer to turn in the best manuscript you can, whether it's for an agent, an editor, a publisher, or a critique partner. Don't make them correct your bad spelling and clumsy grammar. It's frustrating and tedious. They should be deciding whether or not your hero's secret past as a rogue cryptozoologist is believable, not whether or not you meant to slip that semi-colon in that place. As a member of a pretty busy critique group, I'm appalled at how often people are missing the kind of basic knowledge they should have picked up in school - where speech marks go in relation to dialogue, for example. I can only imagine how quickly an agent would decide "no way" on a submission if the writer hadn't bothered to get these things right for them.
Thirdly, as a reader, I don't want to spend the entire story worrying about your spelling. Leave me to interpret the subtle stuff, the underlying themes, the world building, the relationships, and so on. Don't leave me sitting there asking why the hell your character has suddenly changed from Serena to Samara. Or whatever. That part of the deal is not my job. It's the writer's. And as a writer, I don't want a reader throwing my book down and shouting "WTF?" because I cocked up on something incredible simple. Same applies to blogging. Just because it's blogging, doesn't mean the rules don't apply.
If you put something on the internet, people will read it. If you mangle the spelling and punctuation, people will judge you on it. Sorry. It's true. Maybe not everyone. Not everyone gets all excited and irate about these things like I do, but some people do. And it will affect their opinion on you and maybe stop them revisiting your blog. After all, if you're a writer who doesn't care enough about the tools of your trade to use them correctly on your blog, what does that say about the quality of your books? To the casual reader, probably not a lot.
I know I'm sounding a bit overzealous, but this is important to me. And it should be important to all readers and writers. Effective communication is a two-way street. And no, it's not okay to say "you can't achieve perfection." There's a difference between obsessing over every tiny detail so you never finish your novel and getting the basics right. Remember, if you screw up the basics, it leads to cannibalism. And nobody wants that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
