Sitting in my chair with my red pen in the Ram office on Monday and Tuesday nights, I know I am master of my domain. It is my responsibility to enforce order over all the stories I see. Sentences squiggle in total anarchy across the pages and I, like a gardener pulling weeds, eradicate pesky Oxford commas, carefully tether run-ons with well-placed semicolons and impose logic on misplaced modifiers. Sometimes, the patient gardener gives way to an angrier one, and my profanity over the existence of the passive voice is a familiar sound down in club suite B-52. Like a strict general, I carefully untangle and marshal arguments and separate quotations from paragraph like cavalry from infantry.
To the uninitiated, the intricacies of grammar may seem completely Byzantine. I know very few will care whether or not a podcast’s name should be italicized or have quotation marks, and few understand why a title coming before a person’s name should be uppercase but a title coming after a person’s name should be lowercase. Fewer still would care that the word “coach” is never capitalized as a title except when used as a proper noun.
Being copy chief for The Fordham Ram requires me to obsess over all of the minutia of the English language. I must also contend with the unquestionable wisdom of Associated Press style and often turn to the oracle of the style guide to understand why Massachusetts is abbreviated Mass. when attached to a city but Ohio is never abbreviated. What is the end of all this obsessing and consternation? Why is it important to pay attention to details and be consistent? When I begin to ask myself this question, usually late at night when I am rewording a convoluted compound-complex sentence or trying to decide if a phrase is one word, two words or hyphenated, I remind myself that attention to detail is a form of love. Getting grammar right shows a commitment to quality and respect toward the ideas we try and communicate. Grammar matters.
It makes me sad that grammar is rarely taught in schools anymore. The ability to diagram a sentence is, like the ability to send a telegram: completely prehistoric. Semicolons are regarded as simply too difficult to use effectively in writing; they are treated as some sort of pariah when they should be celebrated as the best kind of punctuation. The beauty and symmetry of a simple sentence with its subject, verb, object construction is rejected for text shorthand.
People treat commas like sprinkles they can just place wherever they please. Writers fail to treasure every word for its uniqueness and instead turn to the thesaurus as a lazy kind of dress up (Writing tip: if you do not know what a word means, you are probably using it incorrectly). We need to understand that writing is sacred and needs to be treated with respect. Legend has it that when Gustave Flaubert was writing his masterpiece Madame Bovary, he stood on his back step and howled each sentence into the air to weigh how it would sound. He knew every single word of his novel counted and tested each and every one as a result. Writing is a window into how we think, and deserves a level of precision and forethought few other tasks require. So, the next time you sit down to write, whether you are writing a letter, an essay or an article for us here at the Ram, pay attention.
