Yep, I know. After reading this story, the parents of school-age kids out there will be irritated at me for months simply because I said it’s okay to break rules.
Trust me, it’s not intentional. But if you do get really upset, please don’t send emails to my editor. Send all of them to my dad in Florida. After all, it’s his fault. He and Mom taught us kids that honesty is the best policy.
Rules are meant to be broken. The rules of English, that is.
Met an old friend the other day that I hadn’t seen for a while. He said, “I like reading your column. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you must have a really good editor ‘cause you certainly don’t talk the way you write.” Now most folks would take this backhanded comment as an unflattering reflection of their speaking ability. But then again, I ain’t most people so I took it as a compliment.
Yes, I have a good editor. She knows just about everything there is to know about the Queen’s English. When you are talking about nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, run-on sentences, those pesky dangling participles, or even the dreaded comma splice, if words are used incorrectly, you can bet she can see the problem with her eyes closed.
She even made me rewrite the sentence below because it had too many prepositional phrases. Trust me, I don’t even know what a prepositional phrases is, but it seems I had too many of them. Told you she was good.
Writing stories is easy. As a matter of fact, I come up with some of my best ones with my eyes closed. All I have to do is remember my adventures from growing up during those seven years on Flamingo Street. Others come simply by looking around at the world and at the people in our fair town.
It’s the actual writing it down and then getting the grammar part correct that’s difficult for me. How The Editor does it, I ain’t got a clue. Funny, last week when I told her, she said just the opposite. She doesn’t know how I write a different story every week. And yes, I used the word “ain’t” just to bug her.
Mrs. Newsome was my 11th-grade English teacher at Briarwood High School, home of the Mighty Buccaneers. She was the strictest of all the English teachers at Briarwood, and I was lucky enough to have her. I learned that sarcasm was something she didn’t like in her classroom or in any of the papers we turned in. I learned that the very first day. It was just one of her many rules. English had so many rules I didn’t get a good grade in her class.
Mr. Myers was my 10th-grade math teacher at Briarwood. Math was easy to me, and I got good grades. Each problem had only one answer. You either got it right or you got it wrong. If you give the same problem to a room full of math teachers, they would all come up with the same answer. Not so with the English language rules. Ask a room full of English teachers about the use of commas and watch a fight break out!
Purple is the new red. Yep. It doesn’t make much sense to me either when I first heard it, but it’s true. To mark corrections on papers, English teachers nowadays don’t use red pens. They use purple.
Seems test studies have shown red pen marks all over their papers really discourage and demoralize students. Heck, I could’ve told them that way back in Mrs. Newsome’s. I knew the answer for that test without even studying for it.
Guess that makes me smart after all.
[Rick Ryckeley, who lives in Senoia, served as a firefighter for more than two decades and has been a weekly columnist since 2001. His email is storiesbyrick@gmail.com. His books are available at www.RickRyckeley.com.]
