Category: Writing Process

Grammar is not one of my great interests. As both writer and editor, it is important that I have command of grammar, but, as far as I’m concerned, grammar is a secondary matter. It’s like enunciation in speech: it’s important because it facilitates that which really matters: the ideas being communicated. Yes, of course, it’s important to enunciate in speech: if you mumble, your listener has to ask “what did you say?” If your grammar is so poor that your reader cannot understand you, that’s a big problem. But if your grammar is imperfect while your ideas are perfectly comprehensible? Whatever. Grammar is secondary. The ideas are what matter.

When you write or speak, what really matters is the message that you want to convey.  If you’re appreciative of someone and you write to them to express that appreciation, what really matters is that they recognize that you’re showing your appreciation.  If you make a grammatical error in conveying that message—for example, you write “Thanks. Your great!”—it may or may not prevent the recipient from understanding your purpose in writing. If the recipient does understand that you meant “you’re great,” what is lost due to your grammatical error? The recipient of the  poorly written thank you note might be disappointed by your poor grammar while also understanding your gratitude. But how much is really lost? (I ask that rhetorically, believing that not much is lost, while certain that some people will think that the decline of grammar is a terrible thing. But still, the grammar is secondary to the content.)  I’m pretty sure that a lot of people agree with me logically but not on an emotional level: If you ask people explicitly whether content or grammar is more important, people will usually answer “content,” but if you ask them to evaluate a piece of writing, their complaints about grammar are quite likely to come first.

Saying that the message is what matters does oversimplify a little bit, because communicating ideas does not solely depend on the ideas themselves: communication of ideas is influenced by the audience’s view of the speaker/writer, and the manner in which ideas are expressed influences the audience’s views. The first of these concerns—how preconceptions of the speaker/writer influence evaluation of what is expressed—is outside of my discussion of the importance of grammar. (If an audience is predisposed toward the speaker/writer, they are more likely to accept the ideas being expressed, and if they are predisposed against that person, they are more likely to reject, a phenomenon that has been termed “reactive devaluation.” While this is interesting, it moves away from this essay’s specific focus on grammar.) The second concern—how the presentation of ideas influences the audience’s view of the speaker/writer—is a matter of concern for grammar, but I will still argue that it is secondary. It’s not trivial that poor grammar might lead to someone forming a poor opinion of you and your work.  If the material you send to an editor at a journal or publisher is rife with grammatical errors, that will certainly influence their decision. But what if that material has only a few errors?

Here’s a question: would you rather be a person with good grammar and no ideas, or a person with good ideas and poor grammar?  Which person would you rather have as a student? Which person would you rather hire as an employee?  Which person do you think more capable of picking up the skill that they lack? Is it easier to get the good grammarian to have interesting ideas or to get the interesting thinker to develop good grammar? I’m simplifying to make a point about relative value: it goes without saying that it would be better to have both perfect grammar and great ideas, but on a more day-to-day, practical level, if you’re sitting down to write, and you have to ask yourself whether to focus your efforts on getting your grammar right or getting your ideas in order, which effort should you prioritize? My suggestion (obviously) is work on the ideas and to worry about grammar later (this is not to say that you don’t try to get grammar right, or that you don’t fix an error if you see one, but that your attention is not focused on grammar).

When I started writing this post, I was going to focus on one grammatical construction—passive voice—and discuss it, because I had been talking with a writer about how her advisor was strongly opposed to the passive voice.  I have generalized, because the more general issue—the relative importance of grammar and content—is the more important issue. For a scholar or researcher, the ideas are first and foremost. They’re much harder to get in order, and they’re something that the scholar/researcher must do him/herself in order to be able to claim credit for doing original work. In fact, if a scholar/researcher can get the ideas in sufficiently good order, it’s perfectly acceptable matter of scholarly ethics to have an editor check and fix grammar. Indeed, if you’re publishing a scholarly monograph with a substantial publisher like a university press, they will have a copy editor review and fix your grammar.  (This point can be taken as further evidence that an editor for a publisher will be more interested in the ideas of the proposal that you send than in your command of grammar: the editor/publisher will be planning on and budgeting for having someone fix minor grammatical errors. The editor/publisher will certainly have access to plenty of people who can write grammatical sentences; they will be looking for people who have good ideas to fill a book.) 

The work of a scholar/researcher is first and foremost evaluated in terms of the content and ideas. If the ideas are good, they will get accepted and (hopefully) discussed. If the research is well designed and conscientiously executed, the results will be valuable, even if there are grammatical errors in the presentation. (Again, I don’t want to discount the role that grammatical errors play in getting work noticed and accepted.)

Last week, in a post of advice for dissertation advisors, I wrote about this general issue—about how the content is what matters for a scholar, not the grammar. This version of the same discussion is more directed at the writers than the teachers: when you write, where is your attention? Are you worrying about getting the ideas right or are you spending time and effort on grammar? For a lot of people, time spent worrying about grammar can take attention and energy away from the work that really does matter. Again, it’s the contents that matter most. Grammar is not trivial, but it’s not what the writing is about (unless, of course, you’re actually writing about grammar). 

My advice for writers, especially for scholarly writers: write to clarify and explore your ideas. Don’t waste your time worrying about grammar. Yeah, I get it: Your professors will complain about bad grammar, and fixing that bad grammar will reduce complaints. Still, write to clarify and explore your ideas and to heck with good grammar. Once you’ve got the ideas in order, then work to get the grammar right, too. But first, get the ideas in order.

Talking with a scholar yesterday, I was emphasizing the importance of finding one’s own voice.  I was thinking about that point in a very specific sense with respect to the writing she had shown me—especially with respect to the importance of making clear reasons to care—why did the author care? Why should anyone else care? Even a scholar who is trying to present objective research can show us why she/he chose to pursue that particular course of research—presumably because the findings would have some value. When scholars make their motivations and purposes clear in their writing, it helps the reader connect that work to larger ideas.

I was going to write my weekly blog post with respect to those issues, but this morning as I was checking headlines, I saw an article on motivation and advice that connects to these issues from a somewhat different angle—the angle of motivation as opposed to purpose.  When we think about purposes, we can think of them as a form of motivation—“I did X because I wanted Y”—but now I’m thinking more of motivation in a more primal/emotional sense—a sense of willingness to act, and a drive to take action, rather than some specific goal to be reached (some goal is needed for the motivation, but the focus now is on the drive to act abstracted from the desired ends of the action).

The article on motivation and advice reports on a series of studies that showed that people found motivation when they gave advice.  The common presumption is that people who are struggling to accomplish something should seek advice—that by seeking advice, people will be more able and likely to succeed.  The study suggested, instead, that people already had important useful knowledge, and that taking action was the crucial missing element in success.  In the study, giving advice led to the advice-givers feeling more confident about their own knowledge and ability, and thus were more likely to take action.  In one of their studies, done with students at a middle school, “Advice givers spent 38% more time on their homework than the advice receivers spent over the month following the intervention.”

The authors of the study consider a number of reasons that giving advice helps with motivation which I will roughly summarize as the power of focusing on the assets (knowledge) one does have.  When one gives advice, one “conduct[s] a biased memory search by considering one’s past successful behaviors in order to generate advice for others.” When giving advice, the focus goes to strengths and successes (the bias, from the flip side, being that one does not focus on failures).

This basic dynamic of focusing on strengths as providing motivation is related to another study I once read about (but cannot cite), which suggested that optimists were more likely to succeed than pessimists for the precise reason that they overestimated their abilities/performance and thus were more likely to persist in their efforts.  The pessimists might have been more accurate in their assessment of their abilities and performance on the small scale, but that accuracy seems to have worked against them in the long run.  Of course, when giving advice, one is not misrepresenting things (or at least…well, here’s a matter for speculation, actually: to what extent do advice givers simplify problems, thus creating an unrealistic assessment, parallel to the optimists?), but merely focusing on past successes.

Winding this back to the scholarly writer who is presenting work in a neutral, abstracted way: if what you write is scrubbed clean of your motivations and the knowledge that you have, it takes your attention away from the strengths of your own work, and frames everything in a neutral light that avoids focusing on exactly that which is most important to you.

If you are trying to write a dissertation, your work is supposed to be original. So what makes work original? What makes work original is the thing that you have observed that others have not. From one direction, we could say that “the thing you have seen that others have not” is a purely objective thing, for example, you were the first to see the moons of Jupiter (well, that’s attributed to Galileo, but the first to observe some object or phenomenon).  That objective angle might be all there is to your originality.  But chances are that part of your originality was deciding to look for that thing in the first place, or in seeing some significance that others did not observe (indeed, seeing some potential significance that others did not observe is often part of the decision to look at something that others have not examined in the first place).

In expressing your voice, you focus your attention the depth and detail of what you know about the subject. In the studies mentioned above, the advice-givers worked more after giving advice because that focused on what they did know.  This is a reasonable attitude for the scholar to take, too. After all, what is an academic text but a form of educational work? Even the highest-level scholarly works written for other high-level scholars are educational in the sense that they attempt to educate people about things that they did not know. If you are writing a doctoral dissertation, master’s thesis, or other work of independent research, you are doing original research, and so you should be giving “advice” in the sense that you are educating others.  Focusing on what you have to teach others is important from the point of view of the content of your written work.  And, if we think of that same expression of your voice as a form of giving advice, then these studies of advice giving suggest that expressing your voice will also help motivate you.