What I learnt at Pam Peters's grammar school

I am sure that by high school social classification standards, I would be considered a bookish geek. Hell, maybe even by junior primary standards.

Do you know how I know this? Because when I booked my place at the NSW Society of Editors advanced grammar course a few weeks ago, I marked the date in my calendar with pink highlighter and heart stickers. I won’t mince words here—I was excited! I was off to grammar school.

Now, as a journalist and editor with 20 years experience, I pride myself on having an understanding of grammar that my grade 12 English teacher would be proud of. I know the difference between fore, four and for; I cringe at a greengrocer’s apostrophe (pumpkin’s for sale); I know when to use an em dash; and I love colons (or ‘two pricks’ as Caroline Taggart and J.A. Wines call them in their grammar guide, My Grammar and I).

I believe that with something is as fluid as grammar, though, we need to upskill regularly to ensure we evolve with it.

I also took the course because I wanted to gain confidence in knowing how and when to break the rules. (Besides, I've always been in awe of linguistic experts and figure that if I hang around them long enough some of their wisdom might rub off on me.)

Pam Peters, Emeritus Professor at Macquarie University and author of numerous English usage guides, including the Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage, was the expert I was going to hang out with at grammar school.

Over almost six hours, she navigated us through the complexities of verb morphology, interjections, determiners, syntax, lexical cohesion, proximity agreement and so much more. (I now pepper these words throughout my social interactions to give the illusion of brilliance. It’s dazzling, I’m sure.)

Sure, at the end of the day I was ready for a mind-stilling glass of chardonnay, but I left grammar school having achieved exactly what I had set out to do. I had a better idea of when it was okay to break the rules of grammar and I had more of an idea of the shifts currently guiding today’s English usage.

So, here’s a little of what I learnt. (These are my personal interpretations.)

Be true to the style you are writing in

Because different audiences require different writing styles, a blanket approach to grammar and punctuation doesn't work.

If you are writing a document for a government department, business folk from the top end of town or someone who feels capital punishment is appropriate for writers who begin sentences with ‘And’, you’d be wise to follow conservative grammatical conventions.

However, if you are writing for youth or for an audience in a specific region, a formal structure may jar with them and they may feel as if you are talking to someone other than them.

For example, the spoken word and written word often don't complement one another, so if you want your work to encapsulate a more spoken style you will need to factor this in.

A spoken style might dictate that you use gotten instead of got or learnt instead of learned because they sound more natural in speech. Meanwhile, sentence fragments or one-word sentences—‘Whatever.’—may sit comfortably in the text and get the message across well.

To cater to audiences of a certain region, you may need to think about the words you choose. An American audience, for example, will be accustomed to: He left soccer practice early so he could start practicing for his music exam.

In Australia, our preference is that the noun remains as practice, but the verb becomes practising.

Here are some tips to help you better portray your preferred style:

• Ask yourself how it sounds. Is it likely to jar with the audience, or
does it sound natural? If it sounds right, consider leaving it in.

• Is the word or the element of your style that has you perplexed
becoming common usage, or is it common to the region you are writing for? If
it is then great, if not then maybe it is worth a re-think.

Breaking rules

The two main grammatical 'agreements' are formal and notional.

In grammar hierarchy, formal agreement is king. Basically, it rules with an iron fist saying that verbs must ‘agree’ with their singular or plural subjects.

The following example was discussed in class.

The office looks shut. The offices look shut.

Self-explanatory, I hear you say. But then in comes the Queen, notional agreement, who admonishes the King for being too rigid. According to her, it is quite acceptable and common these days to say:

England are all out for 101.

The Style Manual gives another example:

The police have been alerted.

"Here, the plural verb is based on the notion that the word ‘police’ refers to many officers of the law, even though the word is singular in form. This is notional agreement rather than formal agreement.”

So, the two main things I gleaned from Pam’s session on agreements were: A, I now had a name under which to search when I came across singular/plural subject/verb quandaries; and, B, although the formal agreement is always correct, it can sometimes stop the flow of a sentence and sound less comfortable than a notional agreement.

Look for accepted changes

As I mentioned, grammar is an evolving beast. For example, it is becoming increasingly common for nouns to be used as verbs.

She diarises on a daily basis. The boy was stretchered inside very quickly.

It is worth noting that many dictionaries are slow to catch on to these shifts, so it’s worth updating them occasionally.

You’re the author, take charge

Stand your ground with editors—if you know what you are talking about.

If you know your audience implicitly and know what will work for them and what won’t, don’t be scared to put your reasoning forward articulately so that your voice is retained in the story.

If, however, you’re still not sure of the difference between to/too/two and you think txting is the grt new way 2 rite BTW, remember that grammar rules are there for a reason—to get your point across succinctly and easily—and that you need to understand the rules before you can successfully bend them.

The apostrophe's extra job

In Pam's class, I raised the conundrum of illustrating 'dos and don’ts' clearly in text. After all, I wouldn't want people thinking I am discussing computer operating systems when I'm talking about the dos and don'ts of matching fashion accessories.

However, as one of my classmates pointed out, apostrophes are just tools to replace missing letters or indicate possessive, so I wouldn't use one to make dos (do's) clearer.

But what if the apostrophe could be used as what Pam Peters called an ‘auxiliary device’ to distinguish between the stem of the word and the inflection.

If we gave the apostrophe that extra job then surely it would make do’s and don’ts a little less ambiguous. It would also help in this instance: 'There are too many s’s in Sassi’s name.'

I’m hoping that the apostrophe as an auxiliary device gathers momentum, but until it does I still feel that I have little choice but to stick with the ambiguous, yet formally correct, ‘dos and don’ts’.

What if you are really stuck?

Back away. Get out of there. Run for your life!

If you’re really in a grammatical bind, one approach is that of avoidance. Scrap the sentence in question and start again to avoid the problem. (Unless you enjoy a challenge, that is.)

After attending grammar school with Pam Peters, I find I now enjoy grammatical dilemmas even more because I do see them as challenges to conquer rather than annoyances to avoid.

The one comment Pam made that had the most impact on me was a line she wrote on the handouts she gave us in class.

When I read this one sentence I finally realised that while it was right to respect the rules of grammar, it was also okay to fiddle with them when appropriate.

I now have the words stuck on a post-it note covered with pink highlighter and hearts on my computer monitor: 'Not all grammar is cut and dried, right and wrong, but imbued with points of variability to explore.'

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For more information about Pamela Wilson or WriteSmart, log on to http://www.writesmart.com.au/