For a few years, I taught writing and editing courses for businesses. Some workshops flew; others foundered on the simplest points.
Pharmaceutical companies, in particular, often hired Asian immigrants. I’ve no doubt they were well-qualified, highly trained, even brilliant. They had studied English. But they came from languages that didn’t use little things like prepositions. Or articles. Or even commas.
“Why you need ‘the’ before noun?” someone might ask.
Or perhaps, “Why sometimes ‘agree with,’ sometimes ‘agree to,’ sometimes ‘agree on’?”
I offered examples. They would ask, “Where do we find a book that teach us these rules?”
There isn’t one. Or more accurately, there are hundreds.
I could refer them to authoritative texts like the Chicago Manual of Style. Or to Edward Johnson’s Writers’ Handbook, Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer, or the Canadian Writer’s Handbook by William Messenger and Jan de Bruyn. Most publishers either have their own style guides, or use something like the Canadian Press Stylebook. And of course, there are classics, periodically updated, like Fowler’s Modern English Usage.
But not one of them can provide rules for every situation.
An editing colleague once admitted that he keeps an entire shelf of books about language—so he can always find one that supports his own opinion.
As far as I know, no human has ever memorized all the pages about commas in the Chicago Manual of Style.
Learning to use English fluently is not about rules but about familiarity.
If I were teaching those students today, I would tell them to read. And not just to read, but to read aloud.
Reading silently—or worse, skimming for information—won’t let the language soak into the pores of your being. But reading aloud will. You have to say the words; you also hear yourself saying them.
Better yet, read aloud to someone else. If they lose interest, you’re probably not interested yourself in what you’re reading. To read aloud, the words must make sense to you before they can make sense to anyone else. Those characters have to be more than mere names—they have feelings and personalities. An explanation has to be more than a welter of words; it has to mean something.
Reading aloud is the only way to absorb the sonorities of the King James Bible. The wicked wit of Oscar Wilde or Lewis Carroll. The cool logic of Carl Sagan.
Read Dylan Thomas to sponge up metaphors. Read Fred Buechner for prose so limpid it’s invisible. Read Dr. Seuss and play with words.
But read. Then read some more.
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion that proficiency at anything requires 10,000 hours of practice. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration; you’d need to read aloud eight hours a day for five years to reach his threshold.
But an hour a day—even 10 minutes a day—will make a difference. Choose writers who have done their apprenticeship, who have themselves earned Gladwell’s test of proficiency.
You’ll be surprised at the effect. Eventually, the rhythm, the flow, the liquid of the language will have seeped so deeply into you that you no longer need rules. You will know what sounds right. Even if you choose to break the rules.
Author Jim Taylor lives in Lake Country: rewrite@shaw.ca