T.J. Monkey’s has a very specific demographic. We reach young males. 20-23 years old. Who are my friends. Who I e-mail and remind to look at the site. Who are named Bret. Yes, basically, this is all for the benefit of Bret, this whole venture. To keep him entertained, to keep him happy, to keep his interest piqued.
And so I thought, “What better way to really make Bret happy than to write a big, long, rambling article about grammar?” Bret obviously loves grammar, and the way I can tell this is that when he sends Thought submissions to me to edit, they have extremely terrible grammar. You see, Bret loves grammar so much, that everything he sends me is like a big grammatical puzzle for me to solve. I imagine what he probably does is, he writes his Thoughts with perfect grammar and all, and then he goes back and painstakingly changes the Thought, adding in horrible grammatical errors for me to fix.
“Oh, look!” thinks Bret. “In this paragraph, I am consistent with the tense of my verbs! Well, let’s just skiddle dee doo that around a bit…put in a few more there’s instead of they’re’s…aaaaand…there! Let’s see if Porter can solve this little mind bender! He has nothing better to do with his time!”
And that’s where he’s right. I don’t. And I love grammar, just like Bret. So I thought, “Hey, let’s have an article on the site about how important grammar is, and go through some of the basics of good grammar.” And so, here we are. Let’s begin!
Why Grammar Is So Important or STOP! Grammar-time!
Most people in this world don’t give grammar enough damn credit. It’s very important. Why, without it, the books and articles we read would be nothing more than a bunch of unintelligible series of words. It would be like if a roomful of monkeys just typed stuff out on a typewriter, or if someone just cut up the dictionary into little pieces and pasted stuff together at random, or if Ethan Hawke wrote a novel.
Yes, grammar is not unlike the underappreciated friend we all have. You know, the guy who always helps you move, and never asks for anything in return, but consistently reminds you about it, and it’s like this big guilt trip that he just won’t drop. Yes, grammar is that annoying guy, who you don’t really like, and you can’t remember how you even met him, probably through another friend who you no longer keep in touch with, and he always puts stuff on your tab, and his stupid brother crashed at your place for three weeks and puked on your couch, and you can’t get the smell out, no matter hard you try, and he owes you $300, and you’ll never see that money, which is too bad, because you need a new stereo.
That’s who grammar is.
Anyway, let’s look at some basics of grammar. Some of these are things I learned in school, and some are just unspoken rules, rules that I’ve picked up off the streets. The tough streets of Internet comedy essay writing.
First off, we look at the sentence. The sentence is made up of words which, in turn, are made up of letters. The sentence is the basic building block of good writing. Writing that doesn’t use sentences is bad. Unless it’s by James Joyce. And then it’s good. Or, well, I guess poetry doesn’t always have sentences. So, OK, if your writing doesn’t have sentences, you better be writing poetry, or you better be able to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are in fact, James Joyce.
Now, sometimes, people write what they think are sentences, but what are actually “sentence fragments”. Fragments are bad. Very bad. Very very bad. Not good. At all. (That’s a little grammatical humor, Bret, that I’m sure you just found totally wicked!)
You see, a lot of people think that a sentence is just any old combination of words that has a period at the end. This is not true. Sentences have two key parts: the subject and the predicament. The subject is like the main character of the sentence. The protagonist, if you will. The predicament (which is from the Greek “predikamus”, which means “a sentence’s ass”) is like what happens to the main character, i.e. what sort of crazy “predicament” he gets into. You see, a good sentence is like a good sitcom. You have some sort of nutty main character, and then he gets into some kooky predicament, and then there’s some wacky neighbors, and copious amounts of sexual innuendo, and everything gets resolved, and then they roll the credits. Or, in the case of a sentence, the “period”. That’s why the credits are “rolled”, because they are like a period, which is round. Starting to get all this? I know; it’s tough. Look, let’s break down a few example sentences. In the sentence:
Bret eats the sandwich.
“Bret” is the subject. “Eats the sandwich” is the predicament. Ooo! Hey, cool, now, in the sentence:
“Eats the sandwich” is the predicament.
“‘Eats the sandwich’” is now the subject! So, it kind of switched around on us. What just occurred is an example of a “literary device”. Literary Devices are not parts of grammar, but they’re important to writing. This particular literary device, where one part of a sentence turned around and switched to another part of another sentence, is called “The Ol’ Switcheroo”. You’ll often see English professors, while poring over texts, occasionally jump up and exclaim, “Hey! It’s ‘The Ol’ Switcheroo’!” And then they high five each other. English professors are a raucous bunch of blokes.
Other Literary Devices include hyperbole and irony. Hyperbole is when you add in the word “damn” to a sentence. So, let’s say your sentence is:
That’s a big sandwich.
Using hyperbole, you’d get:
That’s a damn big sandwich.
Hyperbole “ups the stakes” of sentences and makes things more exciting, or should I say, makes things more damn exciting! (More cool grammatical humor. Pretty wicked, huh, Bret?)
Irony is when you say something clever. Anything remotely clever is probably ironic. So, whenever describes some situation that’s sort of funny, you should always chime in and say, “How ironic!” You’ll always be right, and people will think you’re smart. (They’ll be right!)
OK, but back to grammar. So you have your sentences, and they make up paragraphs. If sentences are like sitcoms, paragraphs are like “Must See TV”. They’re a group of sentences, placed together because they’re all sort of similar and compliment each other.
Like “Must See TV”, sentences must be ordered very specifically. Your first sentence is like “Friends”. It’s gotta be strong, with appealing characters, and tight clothing, something that people will tune in to see, but it also should be light and humorous, nothing too heavy to scare people off. Your last sentence has to be strong too, like “ER”, so the last sentence should be longer, more dramatic, more emotional, a real show-stopper.
Then there are the sentences in the middle. They are like the shows in between “Friends” and “ER”. They’re like “The Stephen Weber Show” or “Jesse”. No one cares about them, and it doesn’t matter what’s in ‘em. Any time spent on these sentences is just wasted time. No one cares. Just type “blah blah blah”, slap on a period, and be done with them. Or better yet, just repeat the first sentence. People like that, because they’ve already read this sentence, and they’re comfortable with it. And if a first sentence is really good, you can just put it into syndication and use it as a middle sentence in all your paragraphs.
Finally, we’ll go over “voice”. There are two main types of voices: active voice and passive voice. Here is a sentence in active voice:
Bret kicked the shit out of some kid in grade school.
Here is a sentence in passive voice:
Bret got the shit kicked out of him in grade school.
In passive voice, the subject of the sentence (see above) takes a more passive role in the predicament of the sentence (see above again). You should never ever use the passive voice ever. I don’t know why. It’s just, my 10th grade English teacher, she told us that using passive voice was really terrible. Even when it was the more correct way to say something (as in the example above). She really hated it. It was as though the passive voice had murdered a member of her family. Or, well, I should say, it was as though a member of her family was murdered by the passive voice. So just don’t use it. It’s as bad as sentence fragments. Maybe worse. (Hee hee!)
OK, so there’s a basic review of some key parts of grammar. Go forth and use them in your writing! Except of course, if you are Bret. If you are Bret, you should continue to play your clever grammatical games with me. Send me your fragments! Send me all your mismatches tenses and voices! Send me your paragraph-less ramblings! I will continue to solve every puzzle you throw my way, you crazy kid. Until I find something better to do. Like, you know, if “Friends” is on. “Friends” will then be watched by me.
(At this point, Porter was murdered by his 10th grade English teacher, Mrs. Bandy. How ironic!)
FIN
