How to Get Published

by John Bowers

If you want to sell your writing, you need to know your language.

That may sound crazy: “Know the language?  I’ve been speaking it since I was born!”

Maybe so.  But how well do you know your native language?  Can you spell?  Can you punctuate?  Do you understand basic grammar?  Do you understand the difference between subject nouns and object nouns?  Do you understand subject-verb agreement? If not, you won’t just sound like an amateur, you’ll sound like an ELL (English Language Learner…with apologies to real ELLs).

I spent several years in a science fiction writing workshop and I’ve read manuscripts from other sources as well.  I am constantly astounded by the sheer number of people who don’t understand the most basic precepts of English, yet expect to become published authors.  (I’m even more astounded when I run into some of them who have become published authors!)

Examples

The subject is much too big to deal with adequately in the space available, but let me give you some examples.  Take the following sentence:

Their was no time too reach the hospital, so Bill lead us to his old truck; but the ambulance was on it’s way and arrived in time to save Jill and I.

Never mind that the sentence doesn’t make much sense; how many errors can you spot?  I count five.  Five spelling or grammatical errors in a single sentence of 32 words.  Do you know what they are?  If not, then this article is for you.

Here are the problems:

Their was no time

Three words in the English language sound exactly alike, but mean three different things.  Those words are there, their, they’re. This sentence should read: There was no time.

too reach the hospital

You probably caught this one.  Three more words which sound exactly alike are to, too, two. This sentence should have read: to reach the hospital.

so Bill lead us to his old truck

I see this one a lot…in print! The word lead can be pronounced two ways.  One way rhymes with “weed”, the other with “wed”.  The “weed” version means to lead someone, as to safety, or to water.  The “wed” version is not the past tense of lead! Rather, the lead that rhymes with “wed” is the stuff inside your pencil, or your gun, or the paint chips you weren’t supposed to eat when you were a kid.  The past tense of lead (”weed” version) is led (which also rhymes with “wed”).  Therefore, this sentence should have read: so Bill led us to his old truck.

but the ambulance was on it’s way

Here’s another one that I see all the time, in print as well as in manuscripts.  The problem here is that this example is one of numerous exceptions to the general rules of English (and I pity the ELLs who have to learn them); 99% of nouns and pronouns use an apostrophe followed by an S to denote possession (Bill’s car, the dog’s bone, the cat’s meow).  The pronoun it, however, is different.  It is a special case, because another situation intersects and interferes with the normal rule.  The other situation is the phrase it is, which is commonly contracted into the single word it’s.  Because of this contraction, the pronoun it does not get an apostrophe in possessive mode.  The sentence should read:  but the ambulance was on its way.

in time to save Jill and I.

This one is actually my pet peeve.  It’s such an easy rule to remember and so many don’t remember it (I’m talking about newspaper reporters, published writers, even broadcasters)!  This is a classic case of subject noun vs object noun.  If the phrase looks okay to you, ask yourself this - would you ever say “in time to save I”?  No, you wouldn’t.  You would say “in time to save me“.  The same rule applies in a compound phrase.  Thus, the phrase should be: in time to save Jill and me.

This stuff may seem minor or unimportant, but it isn’t.  You need to know what a prepositional phrase is, and subject-verb agreement (he/she/it was, they were).  You need to know the difference between lose and loose, threw and through, one and won, our and are…and many other words that sound alike but are not.  It isn’t that hard.  A few hours of study with a decent grammar book and you’ll be set.

Conclusion

You may be asking: “If everyone is doing it, what difference does it make?”  Simply this: the competition in this business is so fierce that you need every advantage you can get.  Doing it right when others don’t gives you a slight edge; the less work you leave for an editor to do, the better your chances of getting a sale.  Don’t take anything for granted.  Know your language, and use it with surgical precision.

The language has many subtleties, and they take time to learn.  Some are so obscure that no one will care.  But when you make any of the mistakes listed above, reading them is like finding a nail in a pancake - it stops the reader cold.  It creates noise!

And Noise is the subject of my next article.

Tags: English, homonyms, language skills

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Content, Writing skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.