Comma

ONE WORD: Comma

I hate the overuse of commas, as well as the incorrect use of commas. People use them as an excuse to be long-winded. Or as a way to skirt the real issue--to be vague or indefinite. Sometimes, you just have to say what you mean.

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Usually when I do OneWord, I don't bother reading what everyone else has written. But today, for some inexplicable reason, I did. Some of them are incredibly entertaining, others are completely off topic. Interestingly enough, I noticed many people mistook "comma" for "coma." Is it careless reading or ignorance? Check it out here.

Call me a nerd, but I love grammar. So few people these days understand proper grammar; I'm probably included in that category. More often than not, we see celebrities on TV abusing it mercilessly (to the point where I have to change the channel--it's that painful).

Last week, I was sorting through some of my old schoolwork from elementary school when I stumbled upon my Daily Oral Language composition book. Basically, the teacher put up three or four sentences on the board, complete with grammar mistakes. We were required to copy them down, correcting them as we scribbled onto our wide-ruled paper. That was how we learned correct grammar. I don't remember learning a lot of hard and fast rules about what makes a sentence work. We listened to the sound of each sentence, the clarity of the words and ideas, the fluidity of the words off our immature tongues.

In sixth grade, I did Academic Pentathlon (again, I'm a nerd). The legendary Coach Cooper was probably the first person who taught me how to really write. She taught us to organize our thoughts, to construct an argument, to support our ideas. Then in seventh grade, Mrs. Campbell taught us to "show not tell," to be descriptive and colorful and visual in our writing. Mrs. Hertzig in ninth grade taught us sentence diagramming and showed us how to construct more complicated sentence combinations. And several of my Biola professors (Buck, John Mosqueda, Tamara Welter) taught me a lot about editing and refining my writing.

I think what fascinates me the most about grammar is that it's such a powerful tool, and yet it's so widely neglected. We may appreciate it in its various forms: we enjoy reading good books, we laugh at cleverly-worded advertisements, we arrange our schedules to watch excellently-scripted TV shows. But do we ever take the time to think how important a parenthetical can be, or how much a couple of m-dashes can add? How often do we think about the importance of subject-verb agreement? Do we appreciate that a misplaced comma can completely change the tone and thought of a sentence? Do we acknowledge that some of most powerful people in our day and age wield their power through the written and spoken word?

We sometimes complain about international students having better English grammar than those of us who grew up speaking English as our first language. Grammar, however, does not come intuitively. We often understand grammar through years of experience--reading, writing, hearing, and speaking the language. We know how to use it, how to navigate in the grammatical world of English. But try learning the grammar of another language--Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Spanish--and it's suddenly complicated, convoluted, and foreign. It's no longer intuitive.

Language is, perhaps, one of the things that convinces me that there is a God who created the universe and who sustains all things. The ability of human beings to manipulate language, to construct sentences and paragraphs and books, to communicate through combinations of letters and characters (I can hear Ariel now, "Lynnette, I need to consult you on a matter of semiotics")--who can explain that?

Today's Twittering, Facebooking, socially-networked and Blackberry-dependent culture has shown us a lot about grammar and about writing. We bookmark someone's blog because a) they have access to the information we want or b) they write in such a way to capture our attention and affections (by this I mean emotions, passions, interests). On one hand, our short snippet and tiny keyboard platforms have lead to the abuse and complete ransacking of our grammatical structures. I think MTV culture has only added to the dissolution of English grammar.

At the same time, the need for people to become adept communicators is overwhelming. Whether in corporate business or a simple site in the blogosphere, our increasingly shrinking, globalized world requires that we have people who can write--people who understand that grammar is the fuel needed to give power to their words. So next time you read a great book, or bookmark an awesome blog, be inspired by the beauty of good grammar. And don't forget to how to use a comma.