Lit: Text Anxiety, by Kristen Miller

September 4th, 2002: I was a sophomore at the University of Kansas.  And I was changing my major, leaving Robinson Hall and Exercise Science behind forever in favor of Shakespeare, Spenser, creative writing, Middle English Literature.  I called my advisor.  I called my mom.  Had Facebook existed, I’d have published it in all caps.

“That’s cool.  When will you graduate?” was the unblinking response from my friends.  I wanted to shake them by the shoulders and shriek, “Don’t you know what this means?”

It meant no longer sharing classes with members of the football team (KU’s finest),  who invariably slouched in 40 minutes late, spitting tobacco into their Gatorade bottles to keep awake at eight in the morning.  It meant never again returning to wretched physics lab, where I was nearly laughed out of class one day for wondering aloud about the etymology of miscible.  (“Who cares if it’s from Greek or Latin? Please just name two miscible liquids!”)   It meant taking many more poetry classes from my favorite: Dr. Daldorph, whose name suggested that he emerged from his hillside hobbit hole to teach class each day.  On September 4th, I tallied up all the perks of leaving the sciences for the arts.

But there were other implications of which I was still unaware.  Besides joining the ranks of the bespectacled, bescarved, Plath-quoting, Chuck-wearing Chaucer-toters, I had unwittingly joined another group: the Grammar Police.

I passed several months in ignorance of my new title.  But before long I noticed a trend of postscripts appearing at the bottom of emails from friends and family alike.  Mainly they read as follows:

“It’s late, so please forgive me any grammar or spelling errors.”

“I know it’s terrible… I normally never pay attention to grammar and punctuation.”

“sorry about the no caps no periods”

“I didn’t proofread this… don’t judge me!”

Proofread?  An email about meeting for coffee?  I suddenly caught a vision of myself as my friends must have seen me: a thin-lipped, librarian type with horn-rimmed glasses, armed with a sharp, red ink pen.  Triple-underline a lowercase that should be an uppercase.  Slash through any misspelled word.  Curly-thingy a phrase that needs to go.

So here’s the little secret I’ve been sitting on all these years: I don’t know a thing about grammar.  Somehow in all the childhood moving and changing schools, I missed that section where they teach you what a participle is and how to not dangle it.  Commas confound me regularly.  Never diagrammed a sentence in my life.

I learned what I know about grammar pretty organically: reading good writers until the rules soaked in. So I do know how to structure a sentence properly.  I can write an academic paper that will make your thin-lipped, librarian types weep for joy.  Most of the time my deviations from correct grammar are intentional.  Because fragments can be pithy.  And I have a particular affinity for starting sentences with conjunctions.  So there.

In conclusion, writers, write your bliss.  And don’t stress out; there’s no judgment here.

Shameless plug: Post your writing (proofread or not) in the Poetry and Fiction room of the Sojourn discussion board.  I promise you I’m not mentally slashing your words with a red ink pen.

Très Geek: Miscible (from Merriam-Webster), Pronunciation: mi-sə-bəl, Function: adjective, Etymology: Medieval Latin miscibilis, from Latin miscēre to mix, Date: 1570, capable of being mixed; specifically, capable of mixing in any ratio without separation of two phases.  (Two miscible liquids: water, ethanol.)