Because it is. Oh yes. It's time for the jerkiest post of them all. A blog on prescriptive and descriptive grammar rules. The stuff that everypony loves to hate. Or shortly will, because it's just so much frantic fun. Oh yes, yes, yes.
Now, I have bad grammar. Actually, pretty much everyone has bad grammar. The people who like to nitpick other people's grammar? Often without realizing it they have awful grammar themselves. Because there's the "who," "whom" rule, informalization vs. formalization of words, clauses and value in sentences and distribution principles, that bastard semicolon who just refuses to settle on having one damn purpose, and a thousand other things that.
But that all falls under the category of what we know as prescriptive grammar, which hails from traditional "prescriptivism," or the thought that one method of language is the best way to go and everyone should talk like that. In that, you have your "prescriptive rules," the... "DO THIS" of language, and you have your "proscriptive rules," which are... "DO NOT DO THIS."
Guess how often I gleefully ignore both of those rule sets.
I'M DOING IT RIGHT NOW AS A MATTER OF FACT.
Watch me now make everypony from the modernist era angry.
I would like TO DEFINITELY ASK you this question.
FEAR MY SPLIT INFINITIVES.
Okay, okay, okay. Seriously, you think people are bad today because they whine at you about how you're dumb because of this stuff? In the past, people made or broke treaties over the grammar used. Kicked each other out of high society. Slandered and reviled each other. Seriously. But you put a bunch of smart people who think they're all that in a room together and a knife fight will break out much faster than if you put a bunch of criminals in a room together. But then again, you know me. I'm not quite a fan of the unicorn class and all.
But before I get rambling too much on this, let's get back on subject, and look at the other half of things, shall we? Descriptive grammar, which is in many ways the opposite number to the evil, vainglorious Prescriptivism. Descriptive is friendly, and informal, and hugs you. Okay it doesn't hug you, but what it basically follows is the patterns that have emerged in casual society and the how we common-folk speaketh. If you want to simplify it, it's pretty much the way you and I talk, informal language and informal, popular usage. Although amusingly enough, some grammatical rules actually stem from Descriptive grammar and not Prescriptive... which Prescriptive purists would become furious over. So the next time someone tells you it should be "you and I" and not "you and me" you can tell them that many Prescriptivists actually state the opposite.
Now, here's where things get fun. The elite, Prescriptivists, have always declared that writing should be handled a certain way, in a certain form. That this language, our language, has already found it's ultimate apex, and we should all speak a particular way, in a particular methodology. Meanwhile, the Descriptivists just keep on talking however the hell they please, unless they're presenting themselves to a Prescriptive party meeting. Even our formal language these days has taken on tones of casualness and more than a degree of Descriptive rule: but even in the past, even with how seriously language was taken, formalization never took real root. The stories that have survived, all our real written works of art... none of them are a hundred percent grammatically correct, and almost none of them truly hail from the Prescriptive realm.
Go ahead, go look at your favorite author, or grab a book off your shelf. Hell, pick up the dictionary, and look through the definitions. Look at the words, the structure, how much some of them appall, are close to being an abomination (those contain grammar jokes I'm not going to explain). Look at the definition, and how many of them contain mashed together words, split infinitives, clausal breaches. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's not a time and place for fancy-pants grammar... but it does have a specific time and place and it is not something we should allow control or guide or lives, and especially not our writing, even though many schools of thought continue to try and teach this process, hammer this process into our brains.
Look. Look at your books. Look at the books that become successes, productions, worlds unto themselves. Read them, and marvel: what we call a 'personal writing style' is just one person writing words down in the way they think is best. And why am I so hopped up on this crap? Because all of it goes to show that you out there, you and you and you, you can all be writers. You can all find your own 'style,' and you can all learn the basics that you have to learn, and then develop your method of speaking to the world through your stories. It's not about the mechanics. It's not about how perfect your spelling is, or how amazing your grammar is. It's about figuring out how the hell to tell the story in a way that strikes into your reader's very soul, it's about getting your emotions across to the readers who are out there, not looking for some perfect pristine set of words on paper, but a story with a plot and a life of its own.
It's about writing. If you want to write, you write: forget what everyone else is saying. Forget what everyone else tells you. Forget everything, except the story, and write it down, and go back to it each and every day and make it better and stronger until you know you're getting those words across in the only way that matters: you're foregoing all those mechanical gears and instead stretching out a part of yourself, a piece of your heart and mind and soul, and sharing that story not because it's perfect, but because it's the story you want to tell. And like every story, it should be flawed, it should be naked, and it should be handled gently but with absolute trust to a world that you know is going to try and cut you if it gets the chance.
But if you touch even one person with that story, it's more than worthwhile. It's a miracle.
I have to go now because Luna is staring at me.
Forget about the tea party, the learned books, the scholars and the academy. Jump down the rabbit hole instead: Wonderland has a lot to offer, whether you ever share your stories with another person or not.
~Scrivener Blooms
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