(no subject)

[cleolinda]

Would you mind if I ranted for a moment? Thanks.

All right. Once my children's lit workshop got over the initial shock of actually having to do work (see also: "I AM ANGRY AT THIS PROCESS!!"), people settled down and got to work and were generally quite creative and had a lot of fun. But. BUT.

I would like to think that I am not speaking as an elitist snob here. I would like to think that I'm not getting holier-than-thou, because while I've published a few things, they were in teensy little magazines that no one, including the editors, read (I know, because I edited a few of those, too). I would like to think that, once you are in a graduate-level creative writing program, there are a few things you can assume about the quality of your classmates and their writing, even if the primary qualification for the class was "getting accepted to the program and maintaining a pulse."

For example: I assumed that, in a writing workshop, all of the participants would be aware of 1) the presence of and 2) the means of using spellcheck. I assumed that we would all know that new speakers are given new paragraphs in dialogue, and that quotation marks are, in fact, used. However, "they are not" used at liberty "and sprinkled" throughout" the "paragraph like typo"graphical confetti." In fact, I was under the impression that workshop students would be aware of the location of the enter key and would use it as necessary to indicate paragraph breaks, and not run an entire story together like one of Toohey's hellish five-page diatribes in The Fountainhead. I was such a fool, you see. I had this naive, optimistic idea that I would not have to critique stories that set up Jane as a first-person narrator and then say, "Jane walked in the room," and before that feature scenes that Jane is not present to witness. All on the same page. With no transition between perspectives at all. And Jane spelled "Jaen" a couple of times. Oh, and forget your typical your/you're it's/its there/their problems--we moved way past that into barley/barely and passed/past territory. Into "she been lookin" and "he did said" territory. And, such an innocent am I, I assumed we would actually capitalize occasionally. Oh, verily, what an ingénue I was!

And if I sound bitter, here's why: I'm not describing a particular writer or a single story. I'm describing half the stories I had to read--hell, I couldn't read them, much less critique them.

Look. When I go into a workshop, I expect that people will often have great ideas but trouble expressing them. But by "trouble expressing them" I mean "trouble deciding which POV to use, how to develop the character, how to pace the story, how to balance description and exposition with plot," even if people can't walk in and articulate what the problem is up front. I don't even mind a few scattered typos. And one poor girl had plunked her story out on a manual typewriter, and all her contractions had commas instead of apostrophes--no one does that unless they're working around a broken key. So that's cool. It's not even like we have brave, half-literate grandmothers riding the bus in from the sticks to take a class and learn how to Put Their Stories of Wisdom and Experience on Paper. These are all people who have passed through public school systems and at least two years of college. All I expect, really, is that YOU PASSED HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH, HOR. PUNCTUATE WORTH THREE-QUARTERS OF A DAMN OR I KEEL YOU.

All right. I feel better now.


Have been useless today. Updated SAST, updated Trailer Park. Caught up on my f-list reading. Pretended that I don't have a massive paper due Thursday night.

Oh, and in the spirit of procrastination--I don't watch American Idol anymore, but my parents are just glued to it, and they are still aghast about the Jennifer Hudson thing last week. So what I want to know is this: y'all watch AI, right? What do you think happened with the voting? Is it just totally a John Stevens teeny-voters thing (my theory)? Who do you think should win? And since John Stevens and his voters seem to be getting most of the heat/blame in the media, how are actual John Stevens fans reacting to this? I'm really curious to see if people are going to feel chastened and start voting for the "talent," or (more likely) rally around Stevens because OMG HE IZ SO KEWT & TALNETED U HOW CAN U B SO MEEEEEN?

(Wow, I am really coming off like a snob today, aren't I?)

(P.S. I'm also an idiot. This initially got posted to lotr_news for... karmic snob retribution, I guess. I don't know. I R stupid. Carry on.)

Comments

[travelsizedoug.livejournal.com]

The rant on the grammar...
I fucking love you.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Well, as long as I don't sound like a complete jerk about it. :)

[travelsizedoug.livejournal.com]

of course not. it's their fault for being stupid idiots.

[rossywar.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. Lack of/incorrect use of punctuation/grammar makes me weep.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

I just hate being treated like a human spell/grammar check, really.

[anne-jumps.livejournal.com]

And I bet if you talk about the mistakes, they get really defensive and hostile.

"Graduate-level"? Wow.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Yeah...it's a 500-level class.

Actually, they're not too bad about it, mostly because we're all polite and "Uh, you might want to check your quotation marks. I marked them. ON ALL EIGHT PAGES."

Except that there was this one woman, whose writing was really atrocious as far as mechanics went, and we were all very polite and gentle and helpful, but... there were just SO MANY THINGS WRONG that she did get defensive, and really teary-eyed. That was one of our first workshops, and really, she got concrit all around that I would've killed for. The next week, Prof is like, "So, how did the critiquing go? Was it helpful?" And this woman was all like, "*sniff* I thought it was really aggressive and uncalled-for and MEEN." And the experienced writers in the room just turned on her en masse with this death glare, I swear. I guess she wanted a literary blowjob or something, I don't know.

[anne-jumps.livejournal.com]

I'm really not liking this "cycle of ignorance" thing brought about by the whole emphasis on self-esteem.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I swear to Christ mine was the last generation taught to value merit and healthy competition over "I'm okay, you're okay." By the time my sister, who is seven years younger, was in school (class of 2004), they had all moved on to the Everyone Wins Something for Playing thing. You know what? If you won't even try to spell, you DON'T win.

[anne-jumps.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and what is with this "graduation after every grade is completed" shit?

Kindergarten graduations? I don't think it counts if you pretty much HAVE to complete that year of school!

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Unless you're leaving one school and moving up to a new one, I don't want to hear this "graduation" shit, man.

[anne-jumps.livejournal.com]

But we wouldn't want McKennzyeellynne to not feel superior to everyone....

[hawleygriffen.livejournal.com]

I have read some fiction in the past where the enter key didn't exist at the same time as typos and punctuation randomness. Made me cry, those stories did.

I have no idea about AI, having lost track of it after the opening episodes of auditioning.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

I think I'm weird in that I can't bear to watch the auditions. It's like--I feel the shame and embarassment that these people are unable to feel for themselves. It's all vicarious and shit. So anything I know comes from reading the paper or TWOP the next day.

[hawleygriffen.livejournal.com]

It's weird. I'm normally like that, but not much for AI, strangely enough. Although I am just a little bit, not enough to not watch.

[katiefoolery.livejournal.com]

That brings back terrible memories of my Arts/Professional Writing degree. We had one guy once, who wrote brilliant characters with an addictive storyline - but he couldn't spell for crap. And when I commented on the chopping and changing between tenses (in the same paragraph, mind you), he admitted he didn't know how to stay in one tense.

Didn't know how to stay in one tense???

I learnt barely any grammar at school. It was only because I started writing stories when I was six that I managed to learn anything at all. I finally sorted apostrophes out by about the age of twelve. Up until then, I sort of put one in if I hadn't used one for a while.

But really... I think I would have been really harsh, had I been in your position. I would have said something along the lines of: "I can't read this. There are no spaces/apostrophes/commas/hard returns/basic English skills and there's no point in me critiquing your writing if you have no grasp of how to string three words into a sentence."

Because there isn't. I don't really have any time for this crap about the story mattering more than the spelling. The truth is that you can write and understand your own bad grammar, but you can't understand someone else's. The internet has made written communication vital, yet most kids can't write for crap. And I work in a school, so I'm well aware of the fact.

*embarrassed cough*

Sorry. I think I purloined your rant. It's good to get it out, though, isn't it?

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

So good to get it out, yes.

And the thing is--I think what pisses me off is not that they have no grammar skills, but that they're SUPPOSED TO. If you got a shitty public school education, well, the first two-three years of college should have knocked some grammar into you. If you're in a 500-level workshop, by God, you WILL punctuate.

And maybe this is really wanky of me, but I refuse to mark the spelling and grammar on stories that are that bad. I mean, if someone comes to me personally and says, "Hey, I have a really hard time with this and I need some help," I'm all yours. But if you're just like, "I'm 23 and in grad school and I just can't be arsed. Here are copies of illegible rambling for 16 people," well, fuck you.

*cough*

[telophase.livejournal.com]

My first go-round through grad school I was a TA in an Intro to Anthropology class. We were NOT ALLOWED to take points off for grammar and spelling and stuff like that, and the students knew it so the first round of papers were *horrid*. My fellow TA and I copyedited all of the papers with as much bright, bleeding red as we could find, although we assigned grades based on the ideas and not any of the copyedits, then handed them back with stern lectures on how the presentation is as important as the content. It was amazing how much the second round of papers improved. :) And after that we could get down to the students who were having difficulty with English because is was their second or third language, and those who had learning disabilities (that school had a large program for LD students), and not worry with those who were lazy.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Grammar is a funny thing. I don't know anything really about formal grammar and couldn't tell you what a transitive verb was if it shat on my head. I just write things and if they look wrong I go and fix them. It works well enough for me.

Agree completely with wanting to thwap people round the head. I end up proofreading a lot of stuff for people, because I can tell them where to put semi-colons, or at least where not to put them.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Honestly? Everything I know about the naming of grammatical names I learned from taking Spanish. Mostly it's just me eyeballing things, in terms of commas and such. I'm not expecting people to throw down with the objective pronouns or the split infinitives or anything. That's why it shocks me that they can't even run spellcheck or, you know, HIT ENTER once in a while.

[edda.livejournal.com]

Grammar is a funny thing. I don't know anything really about formal grammar and couldn't tell you what a transitive verb was if it shat on my head. I just write things and if they look wrong I go and fix them. It works well enough for me.

Exactly! If you bother to read enough, you'll get a feel for how to punctuate, spell, use proper grammar, etc. Most people don't, which is why more and more people don't know the difference between "they're" "their" and "there" anymore.

I admit I fuck up sometimes when I'm typing too fast, and I do occasionally get that thing where I totally blank out on how to spell something, but for the most part I know what the hell I'm doing.

Those long, pointless, rambling sentences of baroque construction and muddled meaning in my ly LJ when I'm passionately making a point that no one can decipher? What? Whatever are you talking about? Ssshhh...

[edda.livejournal.com]

And when I type "ly" in the middle of a comment I'm just trying to see of you'll catch it. Yeah. Totally.

[edda.livejournal.com]

Ditto when using "of" for "if". Stop laughing at me. Please?

[alpheratz.livejournal.com]

You know, I always assumed that people figured out how to do this sort of thing from *reading books*. You know, you read a book, you notice how words are spelled, how apostrophes are placed, where paragraph marks go, etc. OMG WHAT AN ORIGINAL IDEA. That's certainly why I never had much trouble with spelling and punctuating in Russian before I ever learned grammar in school. Seriously, how unobservant/ill-read do you have to be to not know the basic rules?

On a more positive note: you can't see me, but I'm fangirling you. *fangirls*

[alysscarlet.livejournal.com]

*loves grammar rants*

Makes you despair of the human race sometimes, doesn't it?

Why don't people just read books and pay attention?

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Ooh, and now I find you’re doing a children’s lit workshop? That sounds amazing! Is it for very young children (the 32 pages constraint sounds like picture books), or like chapter books? I wrote my MA dissertation on school stories, and I’m always really interested in people writing for or about the children’s literature market.

I can completely identify with the spelling-grammar rant. We did quite a bit of partner critique at uni, and I was infuriated by some of the simple mistakes – how do you put yourself through grad school without caring enough to spell-check? Or to understand rudimentary grammar? I do make a fair few typos in almost every paper I write, but I know enough to check. And then I’d feel bad about saying anything, because there is almost no way to say “hey, this is spelt differently” or “that sentence sounds clumsy” without coming across as a completely anal snob. Which I can be, but I don’t like to brag about it. I also felt bad because spelling and grammar comes really easily to me (although not so much syntax); I don’t have to think about how to spell or phrase when I’m writing. I know that it’s more difficult for some people, so I don’t want to point out all the errors they make.

On a side note, my uncle once had an exam he wrote returned as fail, because the examiner could not read his handwriting. Sometimes wish I could do something similar at work – I will not distribute this brief as I cannot bear to propagate this abomination of jargon and faux-superior grammatical errors.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we just finished the workshop. We spent a couple of weeks writing magazine stories/articles (Cricket-type magazines), then a few writing picture book manuscripts, then a few writing chapter books. Well, a few chapters, anyway. I really like mine and want to finish it. Unfortunately, that application I put in to have more hours added to the day hasn't gone through yet...

[alitaorg.livejournal.com]

my opinion: the more grammar rants, the better.