Things I hate to think about while writing: grammar.

Honestly, I could care less about grammar. I figure someone else can fix it after me. And herein lies (one of) my biggest faults (but I’m working on it.) It’s a part of editing of course, which I don’t mind doing, but making sure a comma is in the right spot makes me want to tear my eyes out.

Okay, I’m over exaggerating.

I’m what I like to call ‘comma crazy’. I like commas and I tend to put them in places they don’t grammatically need to be. This is mostly because at times I tend to write the way I speak, so when I pause in speech I add a comma even when there doesn’t need to be one.

I’m dragging my feet. I know the truth is that my writing is my responsibility. Even those pesky commas.

I shouldn’t rely on someone else to fix my work, no one should. Yes, there are editors for a reason, but we as writers shouldn’t have them doing our job.

We are in charge of what our prose conveys and how our prose manages to convey that message.

When we write a story it’s up to us to change a sentence that doesn’t make sense. It’s up to us to delete the random commas. (Many slip through…and I’m going to say that’s okay.)

This isn’t really about grammar, it’s caring about the language you choose to tell your story. I use to think I could write a story and hand it off to someone else to polish it. That made me sloppy and less caring about the order I decided to put my words.

And there’s the point.

Care about the way in which your order language. It’s not up to someone else to better order your sentence structure, it’s yours.