Mōrena, good morning!
When I was a kid, just wanting to be left alone to enjoy writing my creative stories, grammar really got in my way. It was boring and hard to remember, due to my inability to well … care about it.
Plus it led to the river of praise for my writing drying up into a rocky creek bed of criticism, so that was a huge red mark against it.
To this day I don’t think it’s super important. I’d far rather someone write their life story and memories (and for that matter any kind of story) and enjoy the creative process of letting that story out, and tidy up the grammar later (perhaps with outside help).
Last night my eight year old impressed me by doing his homework on his own, and even more by telling me what a ‘contraction’ was. I asked him what that meant and he smiled and said he liked it when adults asked him how to do stuff.
He told me a contraction replaces missing letters in sentences. It’s a shortening of a word, for example ‘I would have’ becomes ‘I’d have’, or ‘I have’ becomes ‘I’ve.’
Here are some other examples: ‘She would’ becomes ‘She’d,’ ‘It is’ becomes ‘It’s’, and finally ‘Who is at the door?’ becomes ‘Who’s at the door.’
My eight year old’s explanation was really useful. I’ve been writing for a living for 20+ years and let me just say: I’ve forgotten, remembered and forgotten again so many basic writing rules over time.
And I remembered that some of my Write Your Memoir students make this mistake. So I thought I’d pass it onto you today, just in case it’s useful.
There – that was your very basic lesson in one way we shorten words in our wild, inconsistent, often baffling, but useful all the same, English language.
Write on, my friend, write on.
Charlotte x
PS if you’ve been meaning to join my online course Write Your Memoir, our next online chat is happening Wednesday 18 October. We’ll check in about our stories, I’ll answer questions. And I’ll talk about photos and how to place them throughout your book in preparation for the design and printing stage. You can join up today here and access my whole course, which is packed with info about how to write your memoir.
Charlotte Squire 