I love bikes, poems,

and sentences without any

errors in grammar.

Let’s eat grandma. Yes, that sentence is absurd without the comma. Make that, Let’s eat, Grandma. Now that we’ve transitioned from cannibalism to polite call to dinner, we can  also move to other grammar notes.

Folks have written many books on grammar. Barnes & Noble lists over 6000. Obviously, we will not be doing a thorough study. With that number of works currently available, it is clearly an important subject. A writer needs to keep it in mind.

Previously I’ve stated that one should write with the door closed. This is your first draft and indicates that you write as if no one else is looking. Seeing the preponderance of grammatical errors and offensive musings on social media, some folks have a problem going back through their work for editorial purposes.

Shall we take a short deviation from grammar? NO. There are some folks who think grammar is unnecessary and stifling. I’ll tell you (IMHO) that it is as important as ever. It undermines or enhances your credibility on that same social media. By the second grammar mistake folks are ready to move on to someone else’s thoughts. Back to the process.

You, dear writer, get to choose when to review your writing for grammar. Second draft? Third? Yes, I expect you to go back through your work several times. That final read aloud might be the seventh or forty-seventh time you’ve looked over this piece of writing. Do it anyway.

A special note for self-publishers: do not skip this step. Find a good grammar police officer and have them trample your work. Fix it and have them do it again. I have read more independently published work with distracting errors that I care to admit. I get pulled outside the story, put the book down, and definitely think less of the author. The first error is a mulligan (somewhat okay), the second is concerning. Beyond that I am losing interest in the story and want to count misspellings or misuses. Sorry, it’s what my brain does.

Another pet peeve of mine is en dash, em dash, and hyphen confusion. Each has its own territory. Please don’t be random. En and em are indicative of their width. An en is as wide as an N (capital) in that font. Em, yes, is as wide as an M (capital). A hyphen is not an en. Hyphens are for tying words together. En dashes are for separating numbers (en = number). Em dashes. Making it more complicated, en dashes are selected from the ‘insert symbol’ menu on a computer. So I will grant you the use of a hyphen instead of an en.

Em dashes are eloquent symbols relating to meaning. They have multiple uses, but look into them. Often an em dash —like this one—are used to emphasize a meaning or indicate a change in direction of meaning.

And then there are ellipses… There are three periods — which we now call dots—squatting next to each other at the end of a phrase. The ellipsis (note the spelling change?) should not have additional words after it. It indicates that there is more to the sentence that the reader will not be shown. You are intended to figure it out with logic or context clues. Sometimes it is a sentence fragment that you might recognize and fill in the rest. “Put your right hand in, put your right hand out, and shake…”

Okay, I promised not to teach you everything. Space and patience will not permit. I hope you consider grammar important and devote one of your rounds of self-editing to grammar.

I will be at Vintage & Modern Books (on 6th St in downtown Racine) on Sept. 9. Stop in for a visit between 12:30 and 2:30.

—Christy Hoff

ArtRoot Writer-in-Residence