BY JESSICA SHEN
I have a confession to make: I suck at grammar. No, really—I couldn’t tell you a predicate from a preposition, or a split infinitive from a dangling participle. I never did very well on those grammar worksheets in high school where you have to identify the parts of a sentence, and to be honest, anything I did learn back then has trickled its way out of my brain by now.
But wait—before you clutch your manuscripts to your chest and vow to never submit to Hamilton Springs Press, hear me out.
I am a reader, and no, not the psychic kind. I read voraciously—mostly sci-fi, but standard fiction, and non-fiction as well. I’ve loved to read since I was a child, and I prefer immersing myself in a great book to turning on the TV.
So what, you say? Well, let me tell you. There’s nothing like spending a significant part of your waking hours reading to hone your ear to when a sentence just plain sounds wrong. While I may not recognize a split infinitive as a split infinitive, I know that when I read it, it won’t ring true.
My point is, while formal training is important in its own right, there’s no teacher like real-world experience. Point of fact, this is true for many other fields as well—I know many employers who, to a certain extent, prefer experience to education.
Reading regularly is not just good for improving your grammar—it’s great for improving your vocabulary as well, and I don’t mean just in the sense that you will recognize a lot of words. I often come across words that I may not be able to recite the definition for, but through context, will be able to figure out what they mean. I’ve also developed the ability to extrapolate meaning based on the way the word is constructed.
Now, I’m not trying to brag about what a genius I am being able to glean this information just by reading—I fully believe that anyone can do it. If you find that you have trouble distinguishing between they’re, there, and their, have a knack for writing incomplete sentences, or find yourself reaching for a dictionary more often than you’d like, try picking up a book instead. It will do wonders for your sense of grammar, improve your vocabulary, and strengthen your writing—and if you’ve chosen wisely, you’ll get a great story out of it, to boot.
Between work, classes, and editing, Jessica catches the zzzs when she can at her home in northern California. Her latest project, A Dash of Madness: a Thriller Anthology, was released in July 2013. Her next project, Mr. Gunn and Dr. Bohemia, a steampunk adventure penned by author Pete Ford, will be released in October, 2013.
