About twelve years ago, I finally decided to get serious about writing. I had to do this because I’m a writer-born, and because I realized that my ideas weren’t suited for music. I had lost the handle on the basics that I’d learned in school, so I looked for ways to brush up on grammar and punctuation.

I took a couple of tele-courses, one that dealt with essay writing and one that dealt with various aspects of the craft. I went into it with the feeling that I already knew all that stuff – for I’d been a writer in high school – and that I simply needed a refresher. And, for once, I was right.

The second course, which dealt with various styles of composition, had interviews and advice from teachers and writers of all kinds. But there were one-on-one sessions between college students and professors that made me wonder about our educational system, as it pertains to writing.

In a single session, a professor went over several mistakes that his student had made in her paper. She didn’t know what those mistakes were about, and he had to explain such things as fused sentences, comma splices, dangling participles – the fundamentals.

Now, this person was a sophomore in college, and she didn’t know basic grammar. I was amazed, for I’d learned these things in grade school. And this wasn’t the only instance in the tele-course where someone who had to write for school didn’t know the basics.

Just for reference, I’ll explain a few of those common mistakes, which even experienced writers make.

A comma splice is where you have two independent clauses (basically, two complete sentences) separated by a comma. As in: “I thought of you last night, I wrote you a letter.” Each half can stand on its own as a sentence. You could use a semicolon, which acts as a bridge between two independent clauses that balance each other: “I thought of you last night; I wrote you a letter,” or you could use a basic conjunction, such as, “I thought of you last night, and I wrote you a letter.” Or you could use two complete sentences: “I thought of you last night. I wrote you a letter.” Ultimately, it’s a matter of style and the feel you’re going for.

A fused sentence is where you have two independent clauses with only a space between them. As in: “I got up early I had a lot of work to do.” I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can hardly read a sentence like that; it’s confusing. You could correct this using the same methods that I just described (semicolon, conjunction, or period).

A dangling participle is something like this: “Sitting on the couch, the room was warm.” Now, we all know that no room can sit on a couch. There has to be something (a person, a dog, a Martian, anything) sitting on the couch, thinking that the room is warm. You could say, “Sitting on the couch, I thought the room was warm.” Or you could get creative: “As he sat on the couch with his favorite toy, Fido looked to the windowsill where the cat sat watching him. He knew that dumb cat wanted his toy. The room suddenly felt too warm for him, uncomfortable, so he hopped down and went to hide it.”

When I began drafting this article, I wondered if the professor-student sessions on those tele-courses were somewhat isolated. I even wondered if they might have been staged for the purpose of the program (you can never take the phrase “real people, real situations” too seriously when it pertains to television). But I know a couple of college students, and they don’t have a grasp for punctuation or grammar. It’s not that they can’t learn it; it’s that they never did. And when they write, it’s often far below standard – at the third- or fourth-grade level.

Every writer makes mistakes because every writer is human. And in fiction writing, some of the rules of grammar need to be bent or broken to capture the scene, but such mistakes as I’ve outlined in this article should never make it to the final draft of any work. Yet, at the same time, they do; I’ve seen published novels with so many basic mistakes that I could only stare at the page. That makes me wonder if the writers proofed their work before submitting it, and how long a coffee break the copyeditors took that day. The existence of mistakes in one’s work isn’t the point of this – the point is that we have people graduating college who apparently don’t even know the mistakes when they see them.

It makes me wonder just where writing is headed. I’m convinced that there are many great works that never receive any recognition simply because an editor can’t read them. When I was in school, so many punctuation or grammar mistakes meant a failing grade. And that taught us a valuable lesson: If it isn’t readable, why bother to write it in the first place?

It seems also that our educational system is a big mystery. No one seems able to say for sure where it’s heading. I don’t believe that the art form of writing is dying, but the ground it’s currently standing on seems awfully shaky.

And maybe it’s not as bad as I make it sound. Maybe I’m reaching with this one. But I don’t believe that. The next great author could be a college kid who can’t punctuate properly, or at least understandably (the purpose of punctuation is to make the piece readable; different writers have different ways of using punctuation marks.) How many great works have been lost because of this? And how many writers gave up because no one could understand their work, when the problem lay with grammar and punctuation all along?

For one who doesn’t want to write, or doesn’t have to write, this article is useless. But for those that do, I offer this advice: Take time to learn punctuation and grammar. It can be tedious, but it’s what ultimately makes or breaks the reader’s ability to connect with your words. And that reader-to-writer connection is what it’s all about.