My Relationship to Grammar
Nigel wants me to proofread his book that he's been working on. I'm willing to do it, and to be ruthless for him, as I have never been able to bring myself to be in peer critique at school (long years of training to be nice to the other kids and not brag and not let on how much I knew that they did not because that way lay weird looks and nobody wanting to play with me).
I told him, I'm willing to do it, but it will be a bit before I can get to it, because I want to get the apartment finished before my doctor's appointment on the 30th so when she asks how the new medication is working I can tell her I cleaned and organized my entire apartment.
He wants it done sooner, because he wants to do his final draft and start sending it out, metaphorically bouncing on the balls of his feet saying "come on come on come on", and I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact that he promised himself he could have a month of WoW when he finished it.
Truth be told, I wouldn't mind it either, because if he isn't going to play the baby gnome he rolled on my server, I want my 500 gold back.
So anyway, he wants it done sooner, and he asked did I have any books on grammar, because if I'm not going to do it for him he has to learn to do it himself.
And I said, barely looking up from my cross stitch, that I did not believe I had any, because I had never needed them.
Well, of course, he scoffed and gave me the look that people give you when they think you are puffing yourself all up. But it's true.
They taught me the basics in elementary school, nouns and verbs and what a semicolon is for, and the rest I sort of picked up from the ridiculous amount of reading I was doing. To give you a vague idea, in Michigan public schools there is a program called March is Reading Month, and the student in each school who reads the most books in the month of March--or maybe it was in each class, I don't really remember--gets some kind of a prize, gets a free pizza or something. And I always won, even though I was reading books that were, like, five times longer than what the other kids in my class were reading--the books had to be at your reading level, you couldn't be in fifth grade and read See Spot Run (unless, of course, that was where you were). And since my reading level was "grade 13" from the time I was in about second grade, I could pretty much read whatever I wanted. And since I took every chance to read that I could get, I pretty much did.
By "took every chance I could get", I mostly mean that I would sit on the toilet for hours reading, because the bathroom was the one place in the house where nobody could barge in on you and forcibly remove you to make you do something else; and that when I was in about the third grade I figured out that rolling up clothes and stuffing them against the bottom of my door meant my parents couldn't tell when I had my light on, and so I started staying up pretty much all night.
So perhaps I should say I took every chance I could make for myself.
And I read everything I could get my hands on, which wound up being a little bit of everything, and then settled into fantasy fiction, stuff about horses and historical romance novels. (I cannot be having with the contemporary ones. Not entirely sure why.)
So what it comes down to is, I have never turned in anything and had a teacher tell me to fix my grammar, and I can look at your grammar and tell you it is wrong and what it should be, but I don't know, like, all the grammar jargon. And I don't, you know, really care to, because I don't intend to teach it and anyway you don't need to know the jargon to do it correctly.
Anyway, so Nigel wants me to proofread this book of his, and thank fuck I finally convinced him to start printing it double-spaced, because otherwise there was going to be no way I could write on it what I needed to write. But I still have to clean and organize the living room and the dining room first.
I told him, I'm willing to do it, but it will be a bit before I can get to it, because I want to get the apartment finished before my doctor's appointment on the 30th so when she asks how the new medication is working I can tell her I cleaned and organized my entire apartment.
He wants it done sooner, because he wants to do his final draft and start sending it out, metaphorically bouncing on the balls of his feet saying "come on come on come on", and I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact that he promised himself he could have a month of WoW when he finished it.
Truth be told, I wouldn't mind it either, because if he isn't going to play the baby gnome he rolled on my server, I want my 500 gold back.
So anyway, he wants it done sooner, and he asked did I have any books on grammar, because if I'm not going to do it for him he has to learn to do it himself.
And I said, barely looking up from my cross stitch, that I did not believe I had any, because I had never needed them.
Well, of course, he scoffed and gave me the look that people give you when they think you are puffing yourself all up. But it's true.
They taught me the basics in elementary school, nouns and verbs and what a semicolon is for, and the rest I sort of picked up from the ridiculous amount of reading I was doing. To give you a vague idea, in Michigan public schools there is a program called March is Reading Month, and the student in each school who reads the most books in the month of March--or maybe it was in each class, I don't really remember--gets some kind of a prize, gets a free pizza or something. And I always won, even though I was reading books that were, like, five times longer than what the other kids in my class were reading--the books had to be at your reading level, you couldn't be in fifth grade and read See Spot Run (unless, of course, that was where you were). And since my reading level was "grade 13" from the time I was in about second grade, I could pretty much read whatever I wanted. And since I took every chance to read that I could get, I pretty much did.
By "took every chance I could get", I mostly mean that I would sit on the toilet for hours reading, because the bathroom was the one place in the house where nobody could barge in on you and forcibly remove you to make you do something else; and that when I was in about the third grade I figured out that rolling up clothes and stuffing them against the bottom of my door meant my parents couldn't tell when I had my light on, and so I started staying up pretty much all night.
So perhaps I should say I took every chance I could make for myself.
And I read everything I could get my hands on, which wound up being a little bit of everything, and then settled into fantasy fiction, stuff about horses and historical romance novels. (I cannot be having with the contemporary ones. Not entirely sure why.)
So what it comes down to is, I have never turned in anything and had a teacher tell me to fix my grammar, and I can look at your grammar and tell you it is wrong and what it should be, but I don't know, like, all the grammar jargon. And I don't, you know, really care to, because I don't intend to teach it and anyway you don't need to know the jargon to do it correctly.
Anyway, so Nigel wants me to proofread this book of his, and thank fuck I finally convinced him to start printing it double-spaced, because otherwise there was going to be no way I could write on it what I needed to write. But I still have to clean and organize the living room and the dining room first.