: Re: Do you have to be good at grammar to get published? I am not very good at grammar. Is there someone who would go through and correct your grammatical mistakes, even if you are not good at

@Welton431

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Let me be harsh but direct: I very sincerely doubt that someone who's not good at grammar is a good writer.

Not because grammar is somehow an ineluctable part of good writing -- it isn't -- but because good writing is writing that rings true in the reader's ear, and good grammar is good because it rings true. Let me give you an (admittedly contrived) example:

Not knowing anyone there, the party was boring.

Hearing that, the grammarian will shriek “Dangling participle! Dangling participle!” like a car alarm going off. That's not, by itself, important.

What is important is that the reader, hearing that, will say, “What? Huh? ‘Knowing’ ... ‘party’ ... I doan get it. I wonder what’s on ESPN ...”

The writer who dangles a lot of participles is going to get a lot of his readers watching Sports Center, because reading bad writing is a chore and it’s more fun to watch TV.

The grammarian -- even that inner grammarian who complains not only about real mistakes like misplaced modifiers and subject-verb disagreement but also about split infinitives and sentences beginning with conjunctions -- that guy who sits on your shoulder and tries to suck the fun out of writing is really your early-warning system. When he says this-or-that is ungrammatical, what you should hear is, people may not read it. And he may be wrong, but he may be right.

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