To write smoothly, trust your tongue for grammar rules

Many of us worry that our writing mistakes will distract readers from our message. Especially if those readers are senior to us, or if we don’t know much about them, or if we’re writing in a second language.

Nearly everyone worries about mistakes, from managers to post-doc researchers and professors!

For help, we look to style guides. They give us convenient rules of thumb.

Sometimes the rules of thumb are useful, such as “The abbreviation etc. always ends with a period, regardless of any additional punctuation that may follow.”

But the guides go further, telling us how to order words, to work on real grammar. Here, they try to keep things simple, with rules like “In a nonrestrictive clause, use which.”

They spread these simple rules to bigger topics, for example “omit needless words”. Such slogans seem reassuring but somehow don’t help in practice. If Strunk and White were writing their guide now, would they do it as a series of?memes?

Do these rules help? Mostly not. Sometimes they even hurt our writing, making it harder to read. The people who write the rules don’t even use them half the time!

Here you have a choice. If you like seeing bad mental models disproven, or establishment figures dethroned (sorry Orwell), then head over to the full post: https://earfinders.com/blog/drop-grammar-rules-and-trust-your-tongue

But for a natural way to improve grammar and avoid distracting readers, read on.

The best advice: trust your tongue

We’re writing to make an impact, right? That means that our words need to sink in clearly. One of the best ways to write clearly and strongly is to make sure it sounds good.

How? By reading aloud while revising. This is nothing new — many great writers and academics recommend it, and it works.

But what does this have to do with grammar? Surprisingly, reading aloud also helps us notice issues with grammar. (It also helps pick up the correct-but-really-awkward constructions we sometimes write when distracted by grammar rules.)

In a wonderful book on how speech helps writing, Peter Elbow says:

…the job of making language correct for conservative[*] readers is much easier for most people after they have revised with mouth and ear. It’s a process that cures many “grammar mistakes”—especially the many that come from carelessness or struggles with meaning or struggles with trying to write “correct” language.

*By “conservative readers”, Elbow means those who are easily distracted by seeming rule-breaking, when others would not notice. Of course this does not imply anything about politics.

In this book, “Vernacular Eloquence”, Elbow brings deep research and writing talent to build our own confidence in writing. (Unless marked otherwise, the rest of the quotations in this section are from Vernacular Eloquence.)

Don’t get Elbow wrong: he does see the value of polishing our writing to avoid distracting readers. But he sees greater value in trusting our speech to help unblock writing and give it power.

One thing he shows: how natural speech often flows “topic-first”. Known information, the thing we’re talking about, goes before new information (see the original post for clear examples).

Showing the value of topic-first writing, Elbow uses Joseph Williams’s “Style: ten lessons in clarity and grace”. But he shows how even Williams, such a good writer and linguist, gets stuck without the sense of the voice.

For example, Williams over-extends a rule to keep adjectives with the things that they describe. He changes the perfectly good sentence:

We are facing a more serious decision than what you described earlier

Into the less natural-sounding:

We are facing a decision more serious than what you described earlier.

Elbow believes that Williams distrusts speech-like writing. In Elbow’s view, and mine, that is the wrong direction. Why?

3 Three reasons why speaking helps our grammar

#1 In speech, we naturally produce quite good grammar

We tend to speak in little chunks of meaningful sound. These “intonation units” represent the amount of information that we can pay attention to at one time. (Per Wallace Chafe: Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing.)

When we use speaking to test writing, so that every sentence feels and sounds “right”, the grammar tends to just work:

…the process cajoles our written language into comfortable intonation units. This means that the phrasing fits comfortably into the natural grammatical patterns of the language.

#2 We learn styles by hearing and speaking them

Children don’t learn to “speak like writing”. Elbow talks about a style called Educated Written English, a style that basically won’t distract readers or “get you in trouble”. It’s a style that is no-one’s natural speech. So how do we learn it?

Not by studying rules in books, clearly. But you can get used to it by reading it, and especially reading out loud:

Down through the ages, one of the most venerable exercises for learning to write has been to imitate the style of a respected writer—and this exercise often begins with reading aloud passages from the model author. Reading aloud is how you get a style into your bones so you can reproduce it without planning.

Even those who haven’t practised much can use a different style by imitation.

…spoken language, though it’s language, is rooted in the body. It has access to things that conscious thinking cannot find. This is most obvious with how our mouths follow rules of grammar that our minds cannot tell us about. I remember reading about teachers working with Cockney kids in London who discovered that they could find “correct grammar” when asked to “pretend to talk posh.”

#3 Reading out loud is a wonderful way to spot weak points

It’s hard to edit our own writing when we simply look at it. We can miss obvious things like duplicate words, missing words, typos, and other inattentive errors. It’s even harder to spot the weak points where things don’t join well.

Somehow, speaking words, even our own, lets us hear them afresh, as if someone else had written them. That gives us the space to improve them.

I feel weak places at once when I read aloud where I thought, as long as I read to myself only, that the passage was all right. (Samuel Butler, in Elbow)

Does speaking words help people who aren’t very familiar with the style they’re trying for? Yes still.

One student in particular, who has only been speaking English for 4 years, was able to almost eliminate all of his sentences that sounded awkward. He told me that when he revised, he would read his essay aloud and would reword anything that sounded a bit off. In doing this, his writing improved significantly by the end of the quarter. (David Fontaine-Boyd, email 5/20/09, in Elbow)

How to use this in our own writing?

Follow these steps:

1. Prepare by reading things that use the style you’re aiming for. The more you interact with that style you’re aiming for, the easier it will be to use it for your own writing. Preferably read texts aloud, or at least sound them out in your head. Notice bits you like.
2. When you start writing something new, try speaking your ideas out loud first (recording them if you like, or using voice transcription).
3. When revising, read your words out loud, and see what sounds good and where it’s not smooth.
4. When something trips you up, try playing with the words and their order to see what sounds better.

Grammar follows natural patterns. These patterns change depending on the situation, on the speaker, on the style, and over time as well. It’s interesting to learn about the patterns, to give us more options to express meaning. But we will never keep up, and rules will never quite match what works in practice.

Opinions on “correct grammar” aren’t worth a lot. (Data on styles and patterns is worth more, but it is still hard to use in practice.) If we take rules too seriously, we end up out-thinking our tongues. Ultimately, great writers and beginners must learn to trust their sense of sound.

Appendix: use quick references for final?polishing

Something all these writers agree on: we do need to stick to some norms of punctuation and word usage. These norms don’t always come from the organic development of language; some are just arbitrary choices that somehow stuck (such as punctuation inside double-quotes). But it would distract readers if we broke them, so it’s easiest to follow the rules in these cases.

As they are abitrary, and they may change over time anyway, there is no point reading great long explanations. A quick reference guide is fine to remind us.

Peter Elbow likes a classic guide: Gavin and Sabin’s Reference Manual for Stenographers and Typists. You can still find the core of that book in the Sabin’s The Gregg Reference Manual: A Manual of Style, Grammar, Usage, and Formatting, although you might want to skip the later additions with grammar opinions.

Another option is the Merriam-Webster Guide to Style. I have a copy. A scanned version is available to borrow from the Internet Archive (apparently legitimately). Merriam-Webster also has an online grammar and usage site , with some references on spelling and wording.

Reference guides like this do help you stick to the conventions, at least the easily articulated and understood ones. But the conventions are a piece of “polite” culture floating on a shifting, organically evolving and infinitely rich broth of natural language. To try to tame language is to ladle soup with your hands.

Are you ready to drop the grammar rules? Or doubtful if it works to “trust your tongue”? Please leave a comment either way!