It’s a curious thing: we’re a culture that prizes science highly, yet when it comes to language, the very instrument of our scientific culture, we are often reluctant to learn something of its own science, grammar. The result? We take the long way home.

Consider, for example, the common problem writers seem to have in deciding between every day and everyday. Do I walk my dog every day or everyday? One way to decide the issue, of course, is to say it doesn’t matter: who in the world could possibly care about a matter so minute, especially when the reader will be able to figure out anyway what it is we’re trying to say? And that is true to some extent, for under the eye of eternity, whether two words or one is of little concern.

But the matter is important to the craft of writing, because every craft, or art, follows a procedure, a way of doing things, to achieve its end successfully. If we don’t know how language works, we work haphazardly, by guesswork, opinion, or apathy, and this obscures the reader’s vision; we forget that we are trying to show someone clearly in language what we see in our mind, and the way to that vision is often beset with misunderstandings. Few readers are content for long to see through a glass darkly, and they will abandon us if we can’t work according to the rules of the game.

Grammar, then, is the science that organizes the facts of language, the prime fact of which is words and how they work together. Part of the technology of grammar is a device called the parts of speech, nothing more than a set of eight categories into one or more of which we assign words to understand how they function in a given statement. If we apply this technology to the problem at hand, we can decide between every day or everyday quickly and assuredly.

Two of the eight parts of speech are the adjective and the adverb. Adjectives answer the question what kind of? and adverbs answer when? The word everyday is an adjective and the phrase every day is an adverb. And by applying that simple grammatical science, we will never have to think through the question again: I walk my dog every day, for that is when I walk my dog. And it’s an everyday activity, for that’s what kind of activity it is. A mayor deals every day with the everyday problems of running a city, and watching what I eat is an everyday challenge, although I go to the gym every day.

Questions like this abound in English, and left to our own devices, we can’t work with the confidence we should. Grammar is complex, but it’s not complicated, and if we can jump over our reluctance to learn a little about it, we will find ourselves able to make our own decisions as apprentices—and even masters.

A writer’s bricks and mortar are words and grammar. This is why it is important to set aside time every day to read, the regularity being more important than the amount. Just as there is no musician who does not listen to music nor any painter who does not study the work of other painters, so there is no writer who does not read—for ideas, for grammar, and for vocabulary.

In an earlier post I talked about the practice of keeping a commonplace book, which is a record of your reading. It is the place where you transcribe short passages, maybe only a sentence or phrase, that have arrested your attention for some reason; and in doing that, you will inevitably be at times recording words with which you are not entirely familiar.

One simple technique that helps in accruing a vocabulary as we read is to place an “x” in the margin at the line where we have found a word that is either completely unfamiliar or perhaps only vaguely recognizable to us. We can frequently infer the meaning of the word from the context of what we are reading, and if that is the case, it is often better only to make this kind of notation in the margin and not interrupt our reading to look up the word in the dictionary there and then. But the time will come when we have to gather up the words we have noted and transcribe them to our commonplace book. Then we turn to a dictionary and establish their meaning and basic grammatical information.

That basic information includes the etymology of the word, its derivation or source; you will often find it within hard brackets [  ] in the dictionary entry. It is common to overlook the etymology because we may think the information is too academic to be practical. This is a mistake. Knowing where a word comes from can be a storehouse of images that we can use to build out our first thoughts about an idea. Here, for example, is the etymology of the word mortgage as we might learn it from a college-level dictionary:

          mortgage < Ofr, mort gage, < mort, dead + gage, pledge

With a quick glance to the dictionary’s list of abbreviations, we learn that Ofr means Old French, and that in that language the word mort meant dead and the word gage meant pledge. Behind our word mortgage, then, are the ideas of something given to mark a promise (a pledge) and the ending (or death) of that pledge when full payment has been made. And this imagery continues in the word amortize, the calculating of principal and interest as we gradually pay down—or kill off—the original pledge.

Remember that writing is an art, and every art has its medium, the material it uses to represent ideas. Writers are attempting to put ideas into the medium of words, and the more words we have at our disposal, the readier we will be to communicate (the etymology of which means to share) our experience acutely and engagingly with others.

Most of us most of the time write what is called expository prose, an expensive name for something quite common. Exposition is the presentation of facts, and expository writing, as opposed to description or argumentation, is nothing more (or less) than explaining something clearly and methodically to someone else.

One principle of expository prose is coherence: what you’re presenting and explaining must be arranged sentence by sentence in such a way that the resulting ideas in a paragraph stick together, that you allow no gaps where irrelevant notions can slip in. On this word coherence a teacher of mine in college once told us to think of how the two sides of the fabric Velcro cling together, or how a bur sticks unforgivingly to your clothes. Such should be the arrangement of sentences one to the next.

A fine illustration of this appears in the first paragraph of Richard Manning’s A Good House: Building a Life on the Land, 1993:

It is a measure of the confusion of our times that the simplest words tease out the most complicated questions. Words like “good” and “house.” What do we mean by these? A year of my life turned on this question, a year in which I built my own house.

The four sentences of this short introductory paragraph are very nicely sewn together. The first word of the second sentence, Words, refers back to the phrase the simplest words in the first sentence. The pronoun these in the third sentence refers back to good and house in the second sentence. And the phrase on this question in the last sentence refers back to the entire third sentence which is itself the question. (And notice too that the second occurrence of the word year in the last sentence refers back to the same word earlier in the same sentence, extending its meaning.)

I call this close arrangement of words and ideas backstitching, and I take the term from a particular movement of a threaded needle in the craft of sewing that reaches back to the previous stitch before it advances to the next one. If we regard a word or phrase as a stitch, then we can see in Manning’s paragraph how referring back to a related word or idea in the previous sentence is the backstitch, from which the author can now progress on to the next idea in the next sentence. Backstitching is a way to help ensure we are meeting the principle of cohesion in a paragraph sentence by sentence.

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If you’re interested in private instruction in English grammar and writing, please visit my website, writingsmartly.com, for more information about my work, or email me directly at ultimo@writingsmartly.com. I would be happy to arrange a free consultation in person or by Zoom video conferencing to discuss what you’d like to achieve.

Not enough is said, I think, about the importance of regular reading and its practical effect on our writing. The connection between the two comes as a surprise to many of my students: isn’t reading what we do after we’ve written something? In fact, reading is what we should be doing before we write.

Because every word is so important in communicating one’s thoughts clearly and persuasively, accomplished writers understand the necessity of establishing a daily routine of private reading. It is not possible to improve one’s writing without reading––reading slowly and reflectively, with an eye on the structure and an ear to the sound of other good writers’ language. The art of writing depends, as do all arts, on both knowing the principles and seeing those principles demonstrated in the work of other serious practitioners.

A commonplace book is a record of your private reading (unlike a journal, which is a record of your own thoughts and writing). It need be nothing more elaborate than a simple notebook where you transcribe
a sentence or short passage that has caught your attention for some reason, either for its ideas or for its structure. An author you’re reading, for example, might have written a particularly clear explanation of the complicated world of health care or an unusually vivid description of a garden in full summer bloom. Whatever the subject, some one phrase or sentence or paragraph arrested your attention; by transcribing it attentively to your commonplace book (and ideally speaking it aloud as you write it down), you put yourself in the company of good writing, allowing yourself to be affected by the grammatical structure, vocabulary, and rhythm of the passage. We learn by watching closely.

There’s only one thing you can’t forget in keeping a commonplace book: every passage you transcribe, from the merest phrase to the substantial paragraph, must be put in quotation marks and must be followed by the author’s name, the title of the work, and the page number. This is just right and simple courtesy to others and their work, and it may just save you years later from facing the difficult but perhaps quite probable question: did I write that?

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If you’re interested in private instruction in English grammar and writing, please visit my website, writingsmartly.com, for more information about my work, or email me directly at ultimo@writingsmartly.com. I would be happy to arrange a free consultation in person or by Zoom video conferencing to discuss what you’d like to achieve.