March Forth for Grammar

Every day is Grammar Day around here, but today is special. Today is National Grammar Day.

We learn to hate in school, and then we learn to take it for granted out in the everyday world, but if ever there were a quiet, unsung hero that deserved a made-up holiday, grammar would be it. It governs the way we put words together so that we can express ourselves clearly and be understood. It impacts our impressions of the people around us. Even if you don’t make your living in the literary field, grammar is still key to your interactions with the world you live in.

And if that weren’t enough, without understanding of proper grammar, LOLcats wouldn’t be funny.

You use grammar every day. You speak, you read, maybe you write. Take a moment today to appreciate the rules by which words are strung together. Take a moment to look up one of those confusing rules of grammar and learn something new.

We fake it with grammar every day. Maybe you’ve never been sure when to use lay vs. lie. Maybe you aren’t sure when punctuation goes inside quotation marks. Maybe you’ve never known when to use single quotes vs. double quotes, or what a semi-colon is really for, or where to find an em dash on your keyboard, or whether e-mail is supposed to have a hyphen. That doesn’t stop you from taking your best guess and going on ahead, though, does it? Maybe you even alternate your usage deliberately, covering your bases, so that you’ll be guaranteed to be right at least half the time.

Today, stop and look up one of those things you’ve never been sure about. It’ll only take you a couple of minutes, and once you make the deliberate effort to learn the rule, I have a feeling you won’t forget it. You’ll remember it every time you come across it in your writing or your reading, and you’ll remember that National Grammar Day was the day you decided to stop guessing, take action, and find the answer.

Make it a Grammar Day tradition. Your writing will be stronger for it.