How important is grammar?

I am wondering how many readers look at proper grammar and punctuation as being important to a story? Do you place more importance on the stories words and content or if the quotes and commas are in the right place?
Spankdaddy

Grammar and punctuation make the story readable. If you are serious about what you are doing you will observe the rules.

Alandeveau, what if you don't know the rules? What if your level of grammar education isn't such that you know the difference? If people can understand and enjoy what you write, does it matter if it doesn't have quotation marks in the right place or commas? I am not being argumentative about this. I have a poor knowledge of grammar. I have found that I enjoy writing spanking stories. I'm 63 years old and have no reason at my age to try to learn the rules of punctuation. I have the latest Microsoft Word 2010 software and it's grammar checker doesn't find the mistakes that I make. I respect other people time and I want my writing to be readable but it really is beyond my level of education.

It isn't actually about formal education. Every book, newspaper, article, magazine and indeed item on the Internet that you have read over the last 60ish years will have used basic grammar and your brain will be used to seeing these things properly presented.

We on here do not expect people to be educated in every aspect of grammar, indeed I myself have a mild form of dyslexia where I confuse the letters P,D and B and my spelling is atrocious without a great deal of thought. I have to work a lot harder to validate on here than many who do not have this issue. What we do need people to do is to write in sentences, capitalise at the beginning, use paragraphs and to ensure that direct speech is clear and marked out with the appropriate speech marks.

We are always happy to help people who have problems and we can offer help to improve your writing to the standards required. If you wish to learn the basics of speech punctuation, then we will happily help. 63 is not even close to being too old to learn something new and if you wish to embrace this opportunity to do so, I for one will offer to help you in any way I can.

The stories that you have started to write on here are interesting and have a good strong plot and it would be a shame if you took this as a bad thing instead of merely a chance to improve them.

Grammar is important but some authors have their own way of doing things. For example, Cormac McCarthy doesn't use speech marks or commas. I can't think of any contemporary author who writes more beautifully than McCarthy. Billy Childish doesn't worry much about grammar either.

One of my favorite spanking story writers, Will Henry doesn't use speech marks. What is the purpose of a spanking story? isn't the real purpose of a spanking story to arouse the reader? Not to sound crude, but when I read a spanking story and I get sexually aroused that story hit it's mark as a good story. Did I care that it had speech marks? No, I don't even notice speech marks. If it's legible to the point that I can understand it and enjoy it, that is what matters most to me. I don't ask or expect this forum to lower it's standards on grammar. I also don't feel the need for me to learn where to put speech marks if they really aren't necessary to the enjoyment of the story. I can see where speech marks have their place when someone is quoting something. I don't see where they matter each time a different person has something to say. Understand I did not post this topic to try to lower the grammar standards of this forum. I just want to express my feelings that not everyone is polished in grammar or care to get polished in grammar.

Lack of proper punctuation makes a story hard to read and therefore quickly spoils things for the reader. I couldn't diagram a sentence if my life depended on it, but just from a lifetime of reading I can manage a semblance of proper punctuation because it just "sounds right" when correct.

The best strategy for grammatically-challenged folks with wonderful spanking stories inside their heads might be to find a collaborator.

Guy

Well I guess there are two options then, submit things within the rules of submission of the library, as found under 'Story Submissions' on the Noticeboard, or don't! We have offered help but if that isn't wanted, there is not a lot else we can do.

My stance is to encourage all new writers. We don't expect perfection re stories submitted for consideration, but we do expect people to have the basic principles of writing in paragraphs, using sentences that start with a capital letter and ending with a full stop, and speech marks used for dialogue to make it clear who is speaking. That isn't grammar - it's the English language.

This site is freely available and our admins and validators give up their time for no financial gain to make it the wonderful resource it is. We have already offered you practical help and advice, and there are lots of tutorials on the web about sentence construction, punctuation, and how to write dialogue. I would have thought that given the encouraging feedback you have received about your stories, you would be further motivated and encouraged to improve your writing skills.


I thought the basic premise of your story was good and original, and it would be a shame if you stop writing just because we encourage you to use speech marks and paragraphs.

If I pick up a book or a newspaper I expect the text to be properly constructed and formatted. If it was just a jumble of dialogue and littered with errors, I wouldn't bother reading further. Newspapers and commercial publishers have editorial standards - and so do we. We will continue to be helpful, but it's a two way process that requires your involvement too - and if you aren't prepared to make the effort, then neither are we.

Grammar is a set of rules that have evolved to help people understand one another by written communication. If a grammatical rule doesn't help clarity, it isn't important. I had a running argument with a publisher who believed that there should NEVER be a comma before "and" - yet it's not hard to find sentences where such a comma makes the sense far clearer, or helps to put emphasis where emphasis is due.

On the whole, though, grammar is helpful and worth trying to learn. I've read any number of things - few on SL, I should say - that were thoroughly confusing and even ambiguous for the lack of a few well-placed commas. If you attach, say, a plural verb to a singular noun ("The teacher with the crowd of kids spank the naughty one", for example), you may confuse the reader: in this example, people may be unsure whether the teacher or the crowd of kids are doing the spanking. Sometimes, moreover, bad grammar is the direct result of confused thinking. This may not matter often in a spanking story, but if I read something where it's not clear if the writer is saying that A caused B or not, I suspect the writer isn't clear in his own mind.

Clearly there are exceptions to this, especially in creating direct speech or in poetry. I'm inclined to think we've allowed convention to harden into some rules that constrain expression without making the meaning any clearer. Take this beautifully expressive quote from Parliamentarian soldiers of the English Civil War on learning that their proposed new Colonel was a turncoat from the Royalists: "Colonel Monk? What, to betray us? We took him not long since at Nantwich prisoner!" This works because it emphasises that Monk had been their prisoner, but a modern grammarian (an American, especially, because their grammarians are stricter than ours) would red-pencil it for incorrect word order.

The key concept is CLARITY.