You Gotta (Have to) Know the Difference

[Peg Herring]

You can read all sorts of things about proper use of the English language, and there are arguments galore on line about what is correct. The Net and the ever-present media have ignored propriety in grammar so often that it's hard to know what is right: grammarians cling to proper usage, but modernists claim that frequency trumps rules. So maybe we will see "alright" and "alot" listed as correct in dictionaries, and maybe we'll "lay" down after a hard day's work .(Imagine me cringing here.)

Spelling has become a nightmare, and heaven knows the English language needs an update. A range of folk from Sir Walter Raleigh to IPA have tried to simplify it to no avail, but advertisers seem to be determined to do the job for us, and they may succeed, at least with words like "lite" and "thru" and "glo."

Punctuation is a joke. Only a tiny slice of the population knows (or cares) how to properly use apostrophes (or not use them. "Kitten's for sale" makes me wonder what part of the kittens we're offered). The same is true for hyphens, capital letters, and commas ("When it doubt, leave it out. Please!)

Then there's sentence structure. Well, actually no, there isn't.

The key, I think, is to know the difference. If you write "I gotta" because you want a character to sound sloppy or informal or hurried, that's fine. I like it because it does what you intend. But if you don't know that there's no such word in standard English, you're in trouble as a writer.

When you write, you must be aware of every word. In speech we often confuse "may" and "might," but as a writer you should know which one you want in a given sentence. "I may go to the party" is different than "I might go to the party." (*May* implies permission, *might* implies uncertainty.) Your punctuation needs to help the reader, not distract her. Some award-winning novels notwithstanding, punctuation is important. Like Pablo Picasso, those award-winning authors knew the rules and consciously broke them. It wasn't that they'd lost their style guides and decided to go ahead anyway.

You need to get a good grammar text, a good dictionary, and a good thesaurus and then use them. Find out what's correct, and then decide whether you want/need to break that rule. I'm not saying you shouldn't use "nite" or "kitten's for sale" or even "Laying on the beach" as your first sentence. I'm just saying you'd better know why you're doing it.