Good Grammar or Good Writing?

I recently had the privilege of looking at two rough drafts for stories at an online site for aspiring writers.

At the outset, I should point out that I don’t have any kind of degree, not even a mere associates’. I’ve had some poetry published, but that was in the last century. I’m an avid reader, mostly of science fiction, and I have the first chapter of my novel finished, but haven’t yet decided whether to outline the rest or just forge onward.

The first story was a short-short written for a local newsletter serving a disabled population and its caregivers. It was a description of a program that used horseback riding as therapy. Like Black Beauty , it was written from the horse’s  point of view.  A nice  little piece,  hardly earth-shaking, but its author was justifiably proud of it.

The problem was that one of the author’s caregivers, who had at one time been an “English major,” told her “Professional writers never use contractions.”

Really?

“You ain’t never heard about me without you have read a book….” Mark Twain, professional writer.

‘”Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”‘Margaret Mitchell, professional writer.

I mean, really. The point-of-view character here was a horse, for goodness sake. Whenever I’ve found myself talking to horses, I used tongue-clicks, grunts,and even the occasional profanity. Horses don’t seem to be sticklers for formal English.

My advice to the writer was this:

“When your caregiver wants to write a story,she can leave out the contractions. But the editor of the newsletter thinks it’s fine the way it is, and that’s all that really counts.”

It’s her world, after all,  and if horses use contractions in her world, then that’s what they do, and we can like it or lump it. But we can’t say it’s “unprofessional.” It’s fiction.

Then again, there are essays like this one. Informal and conversational in tone. Not fiction. But when I run it through the spell-checker and online editor, all kinds of bells and whistles go off. I can’t even end a sentence with a preposition when I want to.

I was a little rougher on the second piece, a longer story with multiple points-of-view. It was the spacing that was killing me, with paragraphs shmooshed together and dialog all over the place. One section ended with a period, followed by what appeared to be two separate end-quote marks. I finally solved the riddle by substituting an apostrophe before the period (to mark a plural possessive) and a single set of quotation marks after it. And the shmooshing was a side affect of cut-and-paste transfer of the word-processing file. It got better with later posts.

But I didn’t think it was “unprofessional.” It was a rough draft. I’m sure that nobody would have paid for the piece in its rough form, but it had some interesting ideas, some engaging characters, and incidents that advanced the plot. And if somebody pays for the piece in its polished form, that, in the end, is what makes it professional.