Grammar Woman Grammar WomanAt one point or another in their lives, both of my parents have been teachers. A sneaky side-effect of this was that I grew up with an intuitive grasp of good grammar, or at the very least, grammar that impressed my teachers. Add to this the fact that my most constant companion since childhood has been a book, and you have a random-generation thesaurus who knows how to use her vocabulary and spell it, too.
Lovely grades aside, it can sometimes be a pain to know upon first read how a sentence should be constructed but see it presented otherwise. I can't get through a magazine without shuddering at a writer's inept use of "its" versus "it's" (small hint: the apostrophe is ONLY for the contraction "it is"; the possessive is stuck with the short version). I mean, these people get paid to do it! The least they could do is use it correctly.
To put it oh-so-modestly, I've been a godsend to all my roommates who asked me to edit their papers on a strictly-appearance basis. I make sure the commas don't go where they're unwanted, the participles don't dangle, quotes match up, and all those other picayune things that catch my eye like a fish hook get appropriately moved or banished. Not to brag, but more than one roomie has me to thank for upping a paper by at least a grade. I'll offer my opinion on subject matter, too, but I'll only insist on changing the look, not the content. The sick thing is, I actually enjoy editing; I think it has something to do with my innate need for order (luckily, this need shuts up when it comes to housekeeping -- as long as I can walk across my floor, it's clean enough).
So, to get back to the story at hand, somewheres around applying to college and being as undecided, major-wise, as a compass in a room full of magnets, I put down a list that included English and computers (for the curious, I also listed psychology and music). When Michigan State University in its infinite and collective wisdom decided to offer me a full-tuition scholarship, it took me about two hours to decide that this was a Good Thing, and I would be Stupid to turn it down. (It certainly was more generous that The Daughters of Sweden branch of the University of Chicago offering to give me two grand for taking Swedish.) As a further enticement, MSU offered me a Professorial Assistantship with a monthly stipend of $195. All I had to do was fill out a form listing my preferences. I narrowed it down to my top two interests, computers and English.
What I wound up getting was a position as Resident Idiot, meeting with a bunch of people who were writing a new Intro. to Computers telecourse, the kind of class that they spring on business majors and other non-tech people whose only contact with computers is game-playing and word-processing. My job was to make sure the dialogue was simple enough to follow and perhaps even comprehend, not an easy task when the writers were computer science professors and other left-brained tech-nerds. At first, I was a bit shy about offering suggestions; I was the youngest in the room by at least 5 years, not to mention the only female. However, my anal-retentive grammar eye would not let me keep silent long.
I started slowly, changing minor things like "who" to "that". Then I warmed up to such generous phrases as, "That sounds OK, I guess, but it might make more sense if you put it this way..." One day, one of the group ended a small argument with, "Well, if Grammar Woman says it should be that way, I'd take her advice." From then on, I was the authoritative voice of experience, boldly slashing whole paragraphs, tackling favorite phrases head-on and twisting them to fit in correctly or sending them away with metaphorical tails twixt their legs. (The main professor, who would actually be the talking head of the course, insisted on starting his sentences with "And", claiming that Darwin did it all the time. I asked him the last time he had traveled to the Galapagos Islands, let alone written ground-breaking work on evolution. He grumbled. Out of pity, I allowed him a couple of "And"'s, but kept him on a strict ration.)
It was heady stuff for a freshman. One of the crew wound up having an artist friend of his draw a picture of Grammar Woman in full super-hero regalia. Hence, the above picture (click on it to see the full glory). From the pen-nib wrist-guards to the ink-bombs on the utility belt to the punctuation marks decorating the outfit, it is truly a masterpiece. It's not every day that someone with a trivial obsessive-compulsive complex gets to be promoted to the Galactic Guardian of the Written Word.
If you ever need a piece of work edited, you know whom to call.
