A Note About Grammar
If you’ve read this far, you have probably developed a concern for my ability to use a comma. Debates about the oxford comma aside, I have what my Sarah Lawrence journalism professor once called “a complicated relationship with commas.” I am a self-described nerd. I love to write and therefore would love to boast that I am a grammar nerd. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. While I consider my editing abilities a major part of my professional skill set, if I ever get the dreaded interview question regarding my greatest weakness, my answer will have to be the comma.
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It started in 8th grade when my language arts teacher taught us about something called the “comma splice.” To this day I’m still confused. Despite extensive efforts of Mrs. Stein to drill correct comma usage into my brain I never seemed to pick up what she was putting down. Even my mother, herself a seventh and eighth grade special needs teacher, was flummoxed by the comma splice and what exactly I was doing wrong. It became a future point of conversation for a parent-teacher conference, the end result of which was that I was not recommended to take honors English the next year. This would be a theme.
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I excelled in every other element of the language arts, but the comma would continue to elude me through Oxford Summer School, advanced placement English, and Harvard extension school classes. When I reached those levels of writing, I noticed people paid less attention to my grammar and more attention to the content. I kept writing. I loved it. Part of my decision to attend Sarah Lawrence College was for the writing. Instead of assessing performance through tests, Sarah Lawrence uses a conference system which evaluates students based on lengthy end of semester papers. It was a perfect fit for me.
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Sarah Lawrence treated me incredibly well. The education I received there, the opportunities I had, the exploration I was allowed, the growth I was able to do there, was everything a college experience should be. But Sarah Lawrence was not one for core curriculum, and so despite my professors constant addition or subtraction of grammar in my many, many papers, I’m sad to say my grammar did not improve over the course of my four years there.
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“Amanda is an incredibly gifted writer,” my journalism professor told my parents upon meeting them at my May graduation in 2012. “Not great with grammar but you know, Hemmingway wasn’t know for his commas.”
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I don’t dare compare myself to a great such as Hemmingway, but it is comforting to know that I am not the only one to struggle with the rules of grammar. It’s actually the words of another literary great that have given me the best way to describe the way I use punctuation. Again, I’m not comparing myself to her, but in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking I she writes: “I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying only on what sounded right.” That, about sums up my grammatical style.
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All this to say, I apologize in advance for the commas. But I hope you’ll keep on reading.