Guide to Grammar and Style -- G
From the Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch.
Comments are welcome.
Germanic Diction.
See Latinate versus Germanic
Diction.
See Dangling Participles.
Grace always trumps pedantry.
Don't let rule-mongering make your prose unreadable. See Bugbears, Audience, and Clarity.
Grammar, strictly
defined, is a comparatively narrow field: most questions native
speakers have about a language deal not with grammar but
with usage or style. Grammar is the more scientific
aspect of the study of a language: it's made up of morphology
(the forms words take) and syntax (their relation to one
another). Grammar gives names to the various parts of speech and
their relations (see, in this guide, Adjectives and Adverbs, Antecedent, Apposition, Conjunctions, Prepositions, Imperative, First Person, Transitive and Intransitive Verbs,
Direct and Indirect Objects, and Agreement), so it's useful in
providing a vocabulary to discuss how language works. But if
you're debating whether language should be concrete, or where to put only in a sentence, or when to use
italics -- strictly speaking, that's
a question of usage or style rather than grammar.
[Entry revised 11 July 1999]
I have no
problem with spelling checkers;
while they sometimes miss typos, they rarely give advice that's
downright wrong. Computerized grammar checkers, on
the other hand, are a mess. They not only miss most of the
serious problems, they actually give wretched advice,
often telling you to fix something that's not broken. And of
course they have no sense of grace,
which means they can only apply rules pedantically with no sense
of context. I've played with many of them, and have never seen
one worth the CD-ROM it's printed on. (A fun experiment is to
take some great work of literature and feed it to a grammar
checker, and then to see what mincemeat it makes of it.) Maybe
someday I'll be pleasantly surprised, but for now, rely on your
own knowledge when you revise and
proofread.