Laaaanguage Police

I don’t claim to be a perfect writer. Nowhere in my bio does it say “writes with perfect grammar so suck it.”

Because, if I did write like a scholar, that last sentence wouldn’t have ended in a pronoun tied to nothing. See? The “it” I wish for people to suck is undefined, therefore, once people accept my statement about my writing, they’ll probably run off willy-nilly sucking on who knows what.

Ah crap, I ended in another pronoun…

Despite all the rules of English grammar, I do take a considerable number of liberties in the style of writing, the voice, I use in this blog. Because words flow from my brain straight onto the page. I write what would come out of my mouth if I were having a casual conversation with a friend.

My goal over here is that you read and actually hear my voice in your head. No filter.

That means tons of dangling participles, ending sentences on prepositions, run-on sentences, liberally applied adverbs, and a host of other broken rules. Why? It’s not because I’m a rebel, it’s because of what I already said. Voice.

And when’s the last time you sat around chatting with somebody like this:

“I wish for those who read my perfectly parsed, grammatically correct blog posts, to suck on the object of their choice now that they understand the level of my greatness.”

Or something like that, like I said, I break so many grammar rules on a daily basis that sentence up there is probably a jacked up mess too. But hopefully you get my point.

Colloquialisms and a person’s overall lexicon are what let you know you’re reading an authentic piece written by the person you want to read.

Now, with my ‘general lack of caring for perfection in written words’ defined, there is one thing that happened last night. Something that almost put me over the edge with its blatant disregard for the forming of words.

Because, let me be very clear, ending in a preposition is something I don’t care about. (<-- See?) However, if you screw with the rhythm of words or their pronunciation I’m going to go insane.

Some examples of this include:

Opossum. The animal is not a ‘possum’. It didn’t come over on the boat from Ireland, lined up behind O’Flannery, and heard from the folks at Ellis Island ‘sorry but we’re dropping the O’. In fact, when you look up ‘possum’ in the dictionary the first definition is opossum. See for yourself.

Next, I must define the term first. There are two ways to say this: either, another whole, or a whole other. Nother is not a word. So much not a word that Word red squiggles it as misspelled. Hello?

Sharks. No, this isn’t a joke. Think of all the ways you could butcher the word ‘sharks’. I’ll wait. Anything? Well, if you’re a fan of the San Jose, California hockey team you’re on my language watch list.

Last night all I could think of was this scene from Love Actually:

Because every Sharks fan in the building (including the extremely vocal, cheering fans behind me who I swear were trying to pop the vein in my forehead) seems to think there’s an extra syllable in there.

“Let’s go Sha-arks!”

No. A thousand times no.

Sharks. Say it with me one more time. Sharks. One freaking syllable.

And hey, I get it. Sometimes it can be difficult to cheer for your favorite team when all the clap-clap-clap-clap-clap cheers are built on a second syllable.

As a Bruins fan, life is easy. Two syllables. Let’s go chants don’t take thought or creativity. Let’s go Bru-ins! Two syllables, split at the vowels as it should be.

As a Coyotes fan I can understand the issue though. Coy-o-tes. A three syllable word. Uh oh. Do we take Billy Mack’s advice and cram an extra syllable into our enthusiastic cheer? No. We got creative and used the nickname of our team to slide right into the clap-clap-clap-clap-clap.

Let’s go Coy-otes. (Phonetically: Kai – oats)

The spelling remains the same we just took the emphasis off the second syllable, bunched that syllable into the third and turned the whole thing into two syllables instead of three.

Yeah, I know. Even typing it out loud makes me kind of mad at myself for supporting the transition.

But I won’t apologize because we didn’t add syllables where they don’t belong.

Sha-arks is not a word. Nobody has ever said “I was swimming in the ocean and saw a sha-ark!” People have said “I was walking in the desert and got tracked by a coy-ote.”

Of course, maybe I was just bitter that said double syllable team had just beat the Bruins a couple days prior but I don’t think so. Because, after the Yotes took last night’s game, handily with only a couple minutes left in the third, I left the building happy for the win but happier I didn’t have to yell out “Sharks is one syllable!” to the entire arena anymore.

Language police, off duty.

• • • • • • • • • • •
In addition to this drivel I also write books, both fiction and non-fiction.
Learn more on my author page.

Is There No Such Thing As Quality Anymore?

Sometimes it’s really, really hard to be a Writer. Mostly because I notice the spelling and grammar mistakes in every piece of printed anything now.  And no, I don’t like being a hypocrite, because I’m sure my blog is rife with grammatical liberties, but when your spelling mistake is emblazoned across something that ends up in the hands of tens of thousands of people I’m forced to ask how it got through the cracks.

I’m also forced to consider whether anyone has told you about your mistake.  If not is it because the general public feels too shy to bring up these types of things, or is it because no one noticed until now?  If it’s the latter then I feel it is my duty to pray for this country’s future.  Because it is most certainly headed to a hell where hell is spelled with an e on the end.

When I tell you what it was that I caught (on the first read, at 7:00 in the morning, before coffee mind you) you might laugh and shrug your shoulders wondering why I made such a big deal about it in the first place.  Then again, since I know most of you are like me, you’re probably already sending me an email to find out what the company is so you can alert their marketing department of their huge gaffe.

So as you know we closed with mortgage company one.  We’ll just call them American Slacker Mortgage (or ASM for short).  ASM was probably the most frustrating company on the planet to work with and our deal actually caused multiple people to place them on a black list.  Our broker considered leaving the industry as a whole.  I was counting down the days until we could refinance out of the loan and into a better company who gave a crap about their clients.

(READ: live in the fantasy world inside my head where rainbows shoot out of a unicorn’s ass and we all skip along holding hands, singing the Smurfs theme music with a big smile on our face all the live-long day.  Then everyone pats me on the forehead because of my forced naiveté that everything is sunshine and roses…)

Anyway, about a week ago we received the letter almost everyone gets these days - that our loan was sold.  I was doing the happy dance because it would save me the trouble of refinancing in a couple years.  The new company sounded promising, they were closer to our side of the country so our checks would undoubtedly arrive faster and though I’d never heard of them before I was assured it would all work out A-OK.  For simplicity let’s just call them Our New Bank, or ONB.

We started getting mail at the new house in the past couple days (wahoo!) and yesterday we received the first statement from ONB.  The first of the next, proposed, 360 months of my life.  I opened my statement this morning.  On the return envelope there was one of those tear-off thingies under the flap.  Most of the time those are there to fill out for a change of address or similar.  This one was there to request setting up automatic payment deduction.

I was slightly intrigued (READ: anytime I can be lazy and not have to think about things like paying bills if it can happen automatically then I’m all for it).  So I sat in front of my monitor and read the request.  And then there it was.

When I see spelling mistakes I consider a couple things.  First, is the letter that’s out of place next to a letter that should have been used and was hit in simultaneous error?  Second, is the letter in question next to the space bar and was hit accidentally?

Where this spelling mistake is concerned, the answer in both cases my friends, is a resounding no.  So here’s what I received.

I counted and there are 123 words in the little two paragraph blurb.  One hundred and twenty-three words and a spelling mistake like that slips through?  Especially when word 37 is the same word and spelled correctly!

That’s it, I’ve had it with the utter lack of attention to detail in this world.  The sheer volume of laziness on this planet is astounding to me.  Like I said, I crave laziness as well but not when it comes to stuff like this.  If I released my book including a spelling error within every 123 words there would be approximately 512 spelling mistakes in my manuscript.  Who cares so little they allow something like that?

The sad truth is that the answer to the question is most people.  But how could I trust they’d even get my information correct when entering into their computer?  If they can make a mistake like that on the request for my information, right there in my face in bold purple ink, can I really have confidence in the abilities of the company as a whole?  And as much as it pains me to say it, even with all the lack of caring by ASM at least they spelled everything correctly.

Sigh.

Guess I hold companies to a much higher standard than I should.

Eache and every one of them.

Proofreading, Just One More Service I Provide

I think there is a huge market out there that should be looking to me to help them and I’m offering those services starting today. That market is, specifically, the people who post content online but clearly have no clue how to re-read, review, or proofread their own work for mistakes. Or perhaps they are just too lazy and don’t care.

Can someone please explain to me how these people maintain a readership and sell thousands of self-published books every year? Perhaps they would have an even bigger following and sell even more if they were able to make the best possible use of the English language. I am here to help them get there.

In the many years I’ve been online I’ve started to notice a trend where people post things they clearly never read through a second time (let alone a third or more) and mistakes are blindingly evident. One of the first places I saw it occurring on a regular basis was Monster.com job postings.

Nothing made me want to scream more than reading through a job posting that was asking someone to be “detail orientated”. After a while I started applying for jobs by editing their job posting and emailing the revised version back to them with a copy of my resume.

It made me feel great knowing I was helping them even if they never took advantage of the changes I had suggested (I never really went back to look). I felt I was the detail oriented candidate they were allegedly looking for so it naturally surprised me when I didn’t land a single one of those jobs. Go figure.

Now, the writers of online content have upped the ante. Yes, I said Writers. I’m starting to question if perhaps what I should have been doing back then was posting my resume to include all those website links that I proofread and edited for spelling and grammar because not only is it still happening in places like Monster, but Writers are doing it too. Again, yes, I said Writers.

Writers not knowing how to spell? Writers not proofing their own blog post at least once before it goes out on the internet? Writers that are selling thousands of copies of their book on Amazon, have people complimenting their posts and all the while they can’t format a complete structured sentence???

Yes I’m on a soapbox. Yes I totally hold myself to a higher standard in my own writing. Yes I also acknowledge the fact that I definitely write in a conversational tone on my blog and uber literary types probably cringe at my work sometimes. But at least I flipping know how to spell definitely.

So that’s it. I’ve had it with reading articles every morning that alleged Writers have posted, just to become frustrated; popping a vein because it reads like a third grader’s paper.

YOU ARE A WRITER, YOU REALLY NEED TO START ACTING LIKE ONE ALL THE TIME!

And no I’m not sorry for shouting, this shit is serious.

I’m saying it out loud, here and now, that I am available for hire. I truly want to help you to be better. Please, for the love of WORDS, just send me your work before you put it out on the internet. I will do my best to make it read professionally. I’m not even going to charge a lot, just get me at my fiverr listing and I'll start working to proof and edit your 2000 word piece. My turn time will be quick. I’ll pull a contract together and all that happy crap. You can just send me money through PayPal.

This is a service I’m willing to provide for the following types of content:
• Blog posts
• School papers (15 pages or less, over 15 let’s talk)
• Articles
• Interviews you’ve done
• Merchandise listings
• Other stuff just email me

Please, please, PLEASE help me clean up the internet’s bulk of information to read more smoothly. In this world of acronyms we can’t let the placement of them in sentences, or the spelling of words around them, to exhibit lessened intelligence.

Hire me today.

randomlunacy11 at yahoo dot com

Class Is In Session

A while back I indicated that one of my goals was to reenroll in school and that I had started doing some research on colleges that offered degree programs in English that I could complete online. There were a handful of schools here in the Boston area I started with but many of them were a split of campus and online classes and that wasn’t going to work for me.

Its not that I’m lazy or don’t want to meet other people. The real reasons I like studying online truly fall into just two categories -- 1. class starts & ends whenever I want it to and 2. I don’t have to drive anywhere in the snow. Yes, I mean that second reason whole heartedly.

I really considered Salem State because they have an excellent English Lit BA with a track for an MA but I knew on snowy days (okay, this is Boston so probably even some not so snowy days) it would take me upwards of an hour each way to get to and from campus. Then add in the hours spent in class. Okay, but that’s just what happens when you go to college right? Wrong.

In the time it would take me to commute to and from, I could have completely finished another class if I was studying at home.

With that in mind I knew online was the way to go. Again. This foray into continuing my education would be the third try. But this time I’m doing what I truthfully should have done at age eighteen; I’m finishing a program that speaks to me and one I am passionate about. Unlike my last college experience.

I had started a program online with The Art Institute a whole bunch of years ago and to be fair the only reason I left the program is that I knew it wasn’t what I really wanted to be doing for a living. Interior Design, I quickly found, was loads more about politics and number than actual design.

Plus the hours I spent on school (up to and sometimes beyond forty a week and that was per class) made me question if that’s the kind of time I would have to spend per client because it wasn’t my first love and I had to really work for it to get it a lot of the time. Two clients a week and I would have been a puddle of goo.

Now I suppose it’s probably fair to point out that I am what most would call an uber overachiever. I have an innate fear of failure which keeps me motivated to forge on and throw myself one hundred and seventy percent into whatever it is I am doing. School was no exception and I was a 4.0 student because of it.

But the other thing about me is I also have instinctual intuition and I know when the exact second hits that I’ve stayed too long at the party. When I stopped caring if I got my work done, started completely fucking off and decided I would rather play and play all day instead of complete my class work, it was that moment to thank the hostess and bow out gracefully.

So I did and ever since I’ve been itching to go back.

In my sophomore year of high school I knew what I wanted to do. I was good at it (like I mentioned in the post about editing my friend’s paper; more on that in a minute) and really loved it but at age fifteen I had little, if any, self direction or discipline and without being the top of the pack or the bottom of the pack in school I kind of just faded into the very gray middle somewhere, unrecognized but also un-guided in my life path.

At some point in my life, and I really truly have no idea when it happened, I did a complete 180 from total slack-ass procrastinator to seriously over the top OCD overachiever perfectionist. So now that’s where I am today -- the land of striving for perfection, happy to be a geek, doing it all at once without the assistance of any good drugs (well, except caffeine in the mornings of course).

I found a school that really resonated with me and started researching them right away. Based in Iowa but offering a BA with a track to the MA online, fully accredited and well received from all I found when I Googled them, Ashford University is my new school.

And I already love them! My Academic Advisor is based out of San Diego and not only is he the most easy going guy, he’s really knowledgeable and helpful and he insists on being in touch a couple times a week during the first couple classes just to make sure I’m getting the hang of it all. The entire Administrative staff has been great so far and the application process as well as all that financial aid mumbo jumbo was super streamlined on their website. Unlike some of the other schools I looked into where the admission process seemed like it would be more difficult to figure out than the classes!

So starting on January 4, 2011 I’ll officially be a Bachelor of Arts, English major! (But we all know I’m going on for the Masters, I mean seriously…)

In the long run the degree will open up so many more worlds of opportunities to career paths I can pursue if I so choose (like teaching at the college level in many places, being an editor, etc) but the most important thing is that I will feel the sense of accomplishment that I’ve been longing for the past twenty five or so years. And it will ultimately help me when writing novels of course so that’s always a super bonus.

Oh yeah, and that paper of my friend’s that I helped her edit? Yeah, she got a 93 out of 100 so I guess I’m choosing my path well since clearly it was something I already excelled at. (High five for my friend getting an A!! Holla!!) The difference now is that I’ll just have a better handle on all those pronouns and will be able to prove it with that little piece of paper that reads ‘Graduated’.

Remembering the Past, Tense

Sometimes I wish I could remember why I remember certain things. A couple days ago my very brilliant, yet grammatically challenged friend, sent me her most recent school paper and asked if I would take a look at, and edit it. I asked, in a manner of speaking, if she was ready for the onslaught to come in asking for this favor and she responded, in a manner of speaking, to bring it on.

So bring it on I did.

Structure of a sentence, grammar, punctuation, it all just flowed out of me in editing her document so effortlessly that I almost gave myself a high five in my own honor when I was done. But I decided to wait and see what her grade was before giving myself too many props, and I just smiled then sent it off with a note apologizing for the hemorrhaging pages she would be opening within.

Later, when I was sitting and reading this month’s Book Club selection I received a text from her: “How do you know when to use these versus this?” Without hesitation I typed away two responses and sent them back -- these is for multiples (these books), this is for singular (this sunset), and, these precedes ‘are’ (these are the best books), this precedes ‘is’ (this is the best sunset).

Ever since I responded to her I’ve been going over and over in my head just what type of word ‘this’ and ‘these’ signify and for the life of me I can not come up with it. For example, I know that glorious is an adjective, cat is a noun, and is a conjunction, but what is ‘these’?

While editing her paper I started to have visions of how I could make money in my sorely lacking spare time by charging students ten bucks a page to edit their papers. I’d be a 100-aire in no time! But as quickly as the thought presented itself it was gone with a puff of what’s ‘this’ smoke.

I was always a good English student in school; I could pluck emotion right off a page of a book and write a review so eloquent my teacher would never be the wiser that I hadn’t really bothered to read the text in question. And I just got it. It came naturally and easily to me. Kind of the way I know all of those teachers who taught me so well would cringe that I just used ‘and’ to start a sentence. But this is my blog and I do what I want. Like start other sentences with the word but. Or end the very next one with the exact same word.

Which is where the problem lies nowadays, as a blogger I have a pretty well defined voice and write it how I feel it. That’s all well and good but then when I go and write something like, say, a novel, other brilliant friends edit it and notate themselves blue in the face saying things to me like ‘don’t end in a preposition’ and I panic then look up what the definition of a preposition even is.

It makes me want to get that college degree that I never did get. It makes me want to go back to school and be the one to write the paper instead of being the one who edits someone else’s like a big fat faker. And not just a faker. An Editor with no idea why I’m even suggesting that she make certain changes, other than I know it’s the way it should read. I know I’m good at it and that’s why she asked if I’d do it but I really don’t know why I’m good at it and that’s more than a little disheartening. Call me crazy but it’s the researcher in me that is dying to uncover just what the deal is with all those dangling participles.

Someone remind me again, what’s a dangling participle?

I of course looked it up to remind myself and here’s what I found:
“The example: Plunging hundreds of feet into the gorge, we saw Yosemite Falls would, by such guidelines, be recast as We saw Yosemite Falls plunging hundreds of feet into the gorge.”

Um, okay that seems easy enough but I sat there staring at what I knew to be bad form (the first Yosemite sentence) for like five minutes and couldn’t figure out how to write anything that resembled it. Maybe I’m not cut out to be a dangler after all? Perhaps I keep my feet and arms inside the carpet as the Genie suggested. If that’s true then I wish I could figure out the reason why the ever present nagging of the two word question ‘but why?’ keeps buzzing in my head.

It might be time to take a few grammar workbooks out of the library and give myself the old refresher course. Maybe then I can finally put to rest the desire to find the reasons behind ‘this’ and ‘these’.