For Better Writing

The Story of Grammar Improvement and Other Stuff

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

I’ve been a writer for a long time. I’ve been a reader for even longer. My education was a bit disjointed, but English grammar, writing, and reading were always part of my English classes. Living in a military family, I went to 13 different schools in 12 years. As I edged into high school, the grammar lessons mostly stopped, though I remember a teacher asking me to diagram sentences at some point. I thought it was fun, and I remember learning a lot of new grammatical rules.

Aside from that, it’s been grammar by the seat of my pants, which has worked for me until now.

I finished writing a book at the end of last December. I started it for the NaNoWriMo writing challenge in November. Write as much as you can toward a goal of 50,000 words for a month. I stretched mine to 60,000 words and easily reached that goal by the end of November. The book wasn’t nearly finished then, and I pushed through until Christmas to hone it, flesh it out, and get it to 80,000 words. That’s when I handed it over to my husband to read.

My husband is a publisher and has been an editor for 30 years. Plus, he wouldn’t charge me. I was a little nervous because back when we were dating, I asked him to read a paper I’d written in college. He massacred it. Or rather, I didn’t do a good…