Dems da rules, dude

No, you’re not going to work on Maggie’s farm anymore

“I ‘aint gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more” don’t need your grammar bringin’ me down, man.

If pressed, some formal stuff pops into my brain. It’s is the short form of it is, and there’s no apostrophe in its when it’s the possessive form (but there is when the possessive is Brian’s, or, of the farm, Maggie’s). Informal, too, as in the grocer’s apostrophe: “Onion’s £1.20 / lb”. If someone snapped “give me an example of an adverb / past-participle / pronoun” then I’d be stranded. Slack jawed and silent.

Given those limitations, I couldn’t back up the gut feeling that the committee giving the bad grammar award to the academics’ letter criticising the new school curriculum had done so on a political rather than a bad grammar basis. The examples they cited did seem to require minute dissection, and long, dreary explanation of what was wrong. Interestingly, they didn’t offer up how the points could have been better presented.

Given those limitations, I’ll take all the help I can get, including some straightforward tips:

I don’t know what a dangling participle is, but apparently there’s one here:

Going to the shops, a dog ran in front of my bike.

All you need to do is re-read what you’ve written. Was the dog on its way to the shops (with its doggie credit card and save the world lifetime bags)? That’s what it says. It’s dead easy to write what you think you mean, usually because you start off the wrong way, then have to twist and mangle everything from that point onwards to make things work.

On my way to the shops…

Then all is clear.

That or Which? Say what you mean. There’s some technical-sounding advice and rules, but I don’t really understand them. I have to work with what I’ve got, and what I’ve got is this: that is definite, which is more woolly. In one of those rare lightbulb moments, my own exaple has just popped into my head:

Which one?

That one.

There. Simple.

Who or whom? Whom is pompous, stuffy, and makes you sound like one of those Hyacinth Bucket wallies. Avoid whom. That’s my advice. Unless you aspire to stuffed shirtdom, and pine for the days of Mr Chommenly-Warner.

The greengrocer’s apostrophe. This is up there, I’m sorry to say, in inducing immediate melt-down, instant incandescence, with the seemingly interchangeable their, there, and they’re, were and where, sight and site, etc.

Read it back, change it around, make it better. When you run out of time? Hit ‘send’ or ‘print’ or ‘publish’, and be damned. No-one churns out perfectly formed communication first time, and text and tweets and such thrive on being immediate and the rules don’t really apply.

Me? Well, this is my second language. A tired old excuse, I know, but I’ll keep using it nevertheless.