How Grammar Shapes the World Around Us...or Something Like That

Dear Kira,

Thank you for delving deeper into the world of oral and performative texts! I do certainly agree that you can engage deeply with a text while listening to it, and, of course, there are many texts that are not alphabetic. As someone who studied art history, my mind tends to go right to paintings when I think of non-alphabetic texts. However, you make good points about the importance of the oral tradition to various cultures around the world.

Long story short, I no longer feel quite so guilty about listening to audiobooks, but I do think that I need to try to engage more deeply with the texts I'm reading.

Now, I want to address your question about the fundamentals of writing. While no one gets more upset about a misplaced semicolon than I do, I do think that--at its core--good writing means conveying your message to your intended audience, no matter how you do it.

Obviously, this approach simplifies the realities of life. For example, even if a potential employer is able to understand the message of a cover letter, they are unlikely to hire that person if their cover letter is riddled with obvious grammatical mistakes and misspellings. Also, it's often difficult to understand the message of a piece of writing if it contains severe grammatical errors.

Naturally, these problems aren't as relevant to a person making a video essay.  (After all, no one is going to miss a semicolon in that format). However, I would argue that grammar is still important to all genres of text that involve written or oral communication. At it's base, grammar is a way of packaging information. The ultimate goal of grammar is to organize information in a way that makes it accessible to other people. Without grammar, writing would be an incomprehensible word soup that no one would be able to interpret. Beyond that, I believe that learning grammar trains your brain to think in a certain way. An internal sense of grammar imposes order on your thoughts and ultimately shapes what and how you think. In that sense, I do believe that things like grammar are an important part of a good education.

But, when it comes to things like capitalization and commas (and, yes, I do care deeply about commas), I do think that educators can lighten up a bit. While it is important for young people to have the ability to appear professional, I do think it's equally important to remember that standardized grammar and spelling are recent developments in the history of written language. Well into the renaissance spelling and punctuation were wildly inconsistent. Yet, everyone seemed to be able to understand each other perfectly well. So, returning to an age of inconsistent spelling and punctuation wouldn't be the worst thing ever.

Now, I want to pose a question to you. I recently read a book called Eaters of the Dead, which is a novel by Michael Crichton. In a postscript to the book, Crichton said that he based the story on Beowulf. Crichton said that he wanted to re-tell Beowulf as if it was an actual, historical event. He wanted to work backwards to write an account of a plausible historical event that could have eventually evolved into the fantastical story of Beowulf. Personally, I thought it was a fantastic and terribly exciting book.

However, when I went to read the reviews on Goodreads, I noticed something strange. A lot of people were saying that they were confused or upset to learn that the book was not an account of an actual, historical event. Because Crichton wanted to write a book that described the actual historical event behind Beowulf (an event that he obviously made up), the book is written in a very un-novelistic style. It reads like a non-fiction book, with footnotes and everything. Even though Crichton's book is fictional and he intended it to be read as a novel, he wrote a book that mimicked non-fiction so well that a lot of people thought that the events described really happened.

Now, that's a little amazing to me because some pretty unbelievable things happen in the book (things that I won't spoil, just in case you want to read it). However, Eaters of the Dead (by the way, how fantastic is that title?) does pose some interesting questions about how readers perceive truth.

Why does a book that contains footnotes seem more "real" or more "accurate" to readers than any given novel? How does genre shape our perception of truth? Why should the way a book is written send a message about the value or usefulness of the information inside?

Until next time,
MC