Confessions Of A Teenage Writer

The Importance of Grammar

You despise the word Grammar. The second anyone even mentions the word you want to crawl into a hole and hibernate for a few years. It is the bane of your existence.

Why do you even have to know about something that you don't even think about anyway. You don't think about the proper way to say something when you speak or even as you write. The sentences form themselves in a understandable matter all on their own.

I have always thought this as I went on through school. From first grade on you learn the same basic concepts over and over again never really reaching any advanced form of understanding of what grammar is or even how it helps you. You sit in desk after desk being drilled on the same old: What is a verb? What is a noun? What is a pronoun? Is this an adjective or adverb? What is a prepositional phrase? It goes on and on endlessly, but you never really learn what the proper way to say something really is. However, you can still write well enough. We all understand each other as we speak.

So Why? Why must we learn grammar? What is so important about something so tedious? Something which has a thousand rules that can all be broken in one way or another? Why must we learn something that causes so much stress with so little a reward?

Here is the mini story of my (well, my teachers) explanation:

One day when I was feeling overly curious to have a teacher explain to me what the importance of grammar was I got an answer that I was not really expecting. I do not remember her exact words, but my english teacher, Mrs. Otis, told me something like this: You need to learn grammar not for when your speaking or even writing something down, but for the editing process. You need to learn grammar so you know the basic building blocks to build a beautiful array of words in a way that others can understand. Without grammar the foundation of which you begin writing will crumble into a nonsensical disaster. Grammar is there to make your writing better. To make your words have more impact. To help give what you write music.

Even so, I still have problems with grammar. I still don't always know the proper way to convey what I wish to convey. However, I have vowed to learn. I will learn so that I can have another way to help improve my writing. Especially so I may increase the quality of my writing. I feel as though even if I do not completely understand grammar as a concept, I know that it is made to be used as a tool. Something to help everyone increase the quality of which we write.

I may not love grammar, but at least I do not hate it as much as I used too. I'm glad that I will continue to learn it to help myself, especially in the writing department! Grammar is important. More so then I had previously thought.

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Love grammar, Learn grammar, and try to have a healthy understanding of it.

Thank you so much for reading!

I love you all!

-Tiana Wolfe (a.k.a. ilovexica)

p.s. I hope for those of you that feel the same as I have about pesky grammar have been helped by my explanation for learning it!