I write mainly by feel, willing to use a comma in technically the wrong place if I think it’ll help the overall impact of a sentence align with my intention. I don’t usually fret over proper usage of a coordinating conjunction, nor do I lose sleep if a sentence I feel is on message and accomplishing what I want it to runs on, taking up the majority of a paragraph while English teachers would dock me marks as I shrug indifferently, confident the run-on is being read and understood by my audience, periods be damned.

But even I have standards, a combination of the “proper” English rules and my own homemade mental addendum I (wait for it) feel comprises a concise and desirable English rule set. While understanding others have perfectly viable mental rule sets no more or less valid than my own, there are infractions I cannot stomach, virtual nails on chalkboards testing my comfortable little writing system and my sanity. Improper apostrophe usage elevate’s (sic) my blood pressure: is it really SO difficult to understand the simple difference between “it’s” (short for “it is”) and “its” (the possessive of “it”)?

Yet I recognize I break English rules every single day. See that super-witty intentional misuse of the apostrophe last paragraph? (If not, stop reading this.) I broke both a proper and a personal rule there to make a proverbial “funny.” You laughed, right? (Don’t answer that.) But there’s a difference between disregarding the rules for real effect and out of indifference; the former has a real goal, the latter stems from and encourages mental laziness.

This philosophy made learning screenwriting all the more challenging, especially since I’m self-taught (I don’t like school) and absolutely do NOT write the way I speak. But there’s a reason screenwriting tends to be more conversational and sentence fragment-y: the endgame in a screenplay is to entertain (and sometimes enlighten), which doesn’t require flowery paragraphs of exposition and description to convey. “Florence cocked an eyebrow, puzzled his friend would say something so damning” works in a novel, but in a screenplay, replace it with “Florence looks dumbfounded” or, even better, a bit of dialogue cleverly showing Florence is dumbfounded.

Novels don’t get a free pass, though. It puzzles me when overly wordy literature is praised for that wordiness. JRR Tolkien wasted too much of my precious time in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings novels, where describing things in ways fewer words would have done the job much more elegantly. The Harry Potter films (I never read the books and I don’t intend to) seem cut of the same cloth, and I would have loved to see these books (which are apparently even more filled with nonsense) streamlined into a trilogy instead of eight mostly pointless filler films.

So we come full circle and back into “take the time to word your words well” territory. Hope you enjoyed the trip… because it’s not over yet.

I listen to the Grammar Girl podcast, where the titular Grammar Girl talks about various day-to-day English conundrums, providing history and insight into the language. It’s a good listen and I wholeheartedly recommend it. A recent episode talked about generic singular pronouns and how English lacks one proper. You can read the written version of said episode here. Before listening to this, my view on the subject was simple and rigid: you pick one of the following as your generic singular pronoun and stick to it in ALL your writing:

• Use a gender on its own, like “the teacher and his student” or “the teacher and her student.” I use male, because that’s how I was taught. (And by a female teacher, to boot.)
• Use both genders separated by or, like “the teacher and his or her student.” Wordy but fitting. Sometimes, people like to sub (s)he for he or she, which is fine.
• Regardless of your choice, do not ever use they and their as a generic singular pronoun, lest you be shunned by the learned elite and arrested by the grammar police.

Grammar Girl (which I’m sure isn’t her real name) made me re-think my stance, bringing up that the first solution is seen as sexist (regardless of whether you choose male or female) and the second is clunky and wordy. As English lacks a dedicated set of words to use as generic singular pronouns, they and their are commonly used for exactly that, albeit in error. But why does it have to be wrong?

A personal friend often (and incorrectly) argues that if an English mistake is made commonly enough, it should become the new norm. This same friend often takes personal offense when I call out HIS OR HER bad grammar and is a professional in a field where writing is at least of partial importance, so I take HIS OR HER view on the matter as lazy. And if HE OR SHE is reading this: I hear Google searches can help one’s immensely, and in little time.

But in the generic singular pronoun case, Grammar Girl argued in favor of they and their becoming the new norm, both for lack of a current norm and because there’s actually little reason to oppose such a move: it’s so common as to be the virtual norm already and, unlike my friend’s viewpoint, its “promotion” doesn’t actually dumb down the language in any provable way, despite what different personal friends (all former or current professional writers) are likely to tell me after reading this.

Plus it feels right, both in print and phonetically. So it gets plugged into my personal English rule set, and I’ll argue for its merits against any individual who may disagree, regardless of their busting out the ol’ English school textbooks.