Le Guin 2.1: Punctuation
Continuing this series on doing the exercises in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, we come to Chapter 2: Punctuation.
Whoopee! (I hear you cry.) What could possibly be more thrilling than punctuation?
First quote from Le Guin:
“Correct grammar,” “correct usage,” are used as tests or shibboleths to form an in-group of those who speak and write English “correctly” and an out-group of those who don’t. And guess which group has the power? (STC 32)
I’m just going to leave that there, and ask that you bow low and make obeisance. (Unfortunately, there is a whole new phenomenon in which using English “correctly” marks you as an “elite” and therefore someone not to be trusted—which has not in the slightest altered the boundaries of the original “out-group” to which Le Guin refers. But that’s a whole other matter, and one I’m glad she didn’t live to see come to power.)
She goes on, importantly, to say this:
…the fact is that “incorrect” usage, in written prose, unless part of a conscious, consistent dialect voice, is disastrous. It can invalidate a whole piece. How can a reader trust a writer who seems to be ignorant of the medium she works in? (STC 32)
One key to this is the word “conscious.” She gives the example—well before it became at all broadly accepted, mind you—of using “they/their” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun:
“It’s a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language-legislators. But it isn’t grammatically incorrect. It’s just pushing it a little. I know what I’m doing.” (STC 32)
Props to Le Guin, seriously: I’d never previously seen that argument (which in her book is a little bit longer—I’m just quoting the punchline) made succinctly and forcefully prior to about 2005.
Another key to the remark about “incorrect” usage is trust. This is not something she talks about, and I think that’s a pity. But consider Faulkner, and think about how the opening of The Sound and the Fury has Benjy talking in a weird stream that includes bits of dialect and odd usages and who knows what. (If you’ve not read Faulkner, you should, but consider instead Riddley Walker, or A Clockwork Orange, or anything really good that’s narrated principally or entirely in dialect.) Within a page or two, you come to a crux. You think, “Okay, this is seriously weird; I’m having to work like hell to make any sense of this; should I continue?” And part of the answer—what I hope is most of the answer—is determined by a followup question you don’t usually think about quite so consciously: “Does this author know what they’re doing? Do they know this is abnormal? Are they in control, so that if I put in the work to learn this dialect, I will discover a whole new world?” And with Faulkner or Hoban or Burgess, the answer is a resounding “Yes!” The concise way to put this is, you trust the author.
Another example of trust is when you start reading fantasy or sci-fi, and you get your first mention of wobble-florbs, and you think, “what the heck is a wobble-florb?” Trust is when you say, “Either I will learn what a wobble-florb is well in time for anything where it matters, or else it doesn’t really matter, and the author has already figured out which; I will just put the term ‘wobble-florb’ in my mental dictionary for this book and see what happens, but in the meantime it’s fine.”
How do you establish trust?
Coming back to Le Guin, I think she’s dead right: one of the crucial ways you establish trust is by having every bit of your prose that doesn’t need to be screwy obey the “correct” rules scrupulously and smoothly, as though obedience weren’t something you had to think about.
A long while back I wrote about “thee/thou” stuff and how dreadfully it gets abused in a lot of fantasy. That’s a good example: the second I run into “thee will goest unto thine girlfriend and maketh ye beast of two backs,” I’m out. I can’t trust this author: they don’t know how to use the prose tools they’ve chosen. Same with straight-up dialect: bad Scots, or using “bloody” as a general-purpose low-level swear word in premodern times, or whatever nonsense, I’m out. Just don’t. Don’t do dialect of whatever kind unless you have a very good ear and know the material cold.
Back to Le Guin again…
… stop.
There’s basically nothing in this chapter, unfortunately. The rules, as far as she’s concerned, are in Strunk and White, and you have to memorize them and live with them; if you’re going to break them you’d darn well better know what you’re doing and why.
As long as I’m on this subject, however, I’m going to insert a couple of small remarks of my own.
/rant-on
1. The semicolon and the period are not equivalent. It is true that both must, to be “correctly” used, separate independent clauses; that said, they imply a considerably different sort of link or break between the clauses.
1A. If you are preparing for the SAT or ACT, the semicolon and period are identical. If you are doing the “Writing and Language” section, and two possible answers are the same except that one uses a period and the other a semicolon, both are wrong, because otherwise there would be two right answers and that’s not allowed. Once you have aced your test, forget this rule.
2. If you can avoid a comma and have a grammatically-legitimate sentence, the question should be whether the comma aids in comprehension. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.
2A. On the SAT and ACT, if you can eliminate a comma, you should. Once you have aced your test, forget this.
/rant-off
If you think about it, you can see what sort of exercise Le Guin is going to have me do, and for next time, I’ll give it a stab.
Thanks for reading!