He who smelt it, dealt it

Remember this puerile little saying? I'd like to pretend I've not heard it recently, but my seven year-old is firmly in the scatological phase and shows no signs of emerging. In fact, this is one of the more polite comments he's likely to make at inappropriate moments.

The thing that fascinates me is the way we write the past tense of words like dream, smell, feel and build. On the periphery of awareness, I've noticed that sometimes, jarringly, I'll read things like "The room smelled like cabbage" and wondered if I was trailing behind in the evolution of language, until I discovered an intriguing online discussion.

What I discovered is that the distinction is one of those national things. In England, it's not only acceptable to use smelt over smelled, but usually preferred. In other countries, the opposite may be true; especially in the USA, people recalled being pulled up on using the 't' ending over 'ed', and believe it to be ignorant.

What do you think? Have you noticed this difference when you have read books by authors from other countries? Do you think it matters?

And would it be wrong to teach my other children, "He who says the rhyme, did the crime"...?

Grammar or pleasure?

How important is grammar?

With my teacher hat on, I was on a training course for the new curriculum. The information was skewed heavily to literacy - I have a feeling that the lady was in her element with reading and writing. 

I agreed with a lot of what she had to say, until we came to grammar. I'm sure we can all agree that it is important to write grammatically correct sentences, and then to employ proofreaders to try and catch all the mistakes that got away. But does a good writer - or a child, to be a good writer - need to know the correct terms for grammatical features? 

The lady swung right into action, throwing around terms like 'upfront adverbials' and asking us to determine if a sentence was compound, complex or simple (I'll give you a clue; compound isn't related to having the conjunction 'and' in it). 

Within five minutes we teachers were bored - a Mexican yawn passed around the room. I felt a pang of horror to think that we might tantalisingly offer our young minds something marvellous, like the Hobbit, to read, then strip it of all excitement by studying exactly what kind of sentences are in there. What's more, the trainer said this was crucial to be a good writer - but is it? Isn't it possible to write, to some extent, by instinct? To know how to use grammar without being able to name things correctly?

I was curious about my strong antagonism to what the trainer was saying. Was it just because I didn't know what she was talking about half the time? Was it because we all felt she was showing off and deliberately trying to make us feel underskilled? 

I love words. You have to, as a writer. As a reader, too, that rush of warmth down your spine when you come across the perfect pairing of words, and know what craft went into choosing them - it's priceless. I never talked down to my babies, with bunny or gee-gee. I figured, if they were going to use a word, they might as well learn the right one straight away. I offered tyre alongside wheel and explained the difference. I pull them up, still (though gently) if they use a word wrongly, or mispronounce something. So why don't I believe that children need to know what an upfront adverbial is? Why doesn't it bother me that, for years, schools have called conjunctions 'connectives', which, said our trainer, there is no such thing as? 

I think it's because, to me, the naming of these things doesn't add anything to what they are. Flower is generic; teach a child rose or daffodil and they have more power in their choice of vocabulary. They are enabled to communicate more effectively. Teach them Rosoideae and they are actually less able to communicate effectively except in exclusive circles. What you are really teaching them is how to make others feel excluded; it's jargon, and unnecessary. What it might do instead is turn hundreds of children off literacy - make it stale and dry. What a crime. If they don't need to know it, don't teach it to them. I don't believe for a second that it will make them a better writer. And if, as adults, they want to write for a living, and discover that knowing more grammatical terms will enable them to communicate better in online forums with other writers, or on courses to improve their writing - then it won't take long to learn. 

Let's try to leave some pleasure in reading for the digital generations. 

Fighting fear

Does fear of failure stop you from writing? I've been struggling to get back into my novel after the summer break, because I knew there was a lot of structural work to do. I was so overwhelmed, I've been avoiding it; I even cleaned behind the fridge.

But today I took my 2 year old and my notebooks to a play centre. I told myself a half hour would do, then I could stop, wherever I was up to. And, to my surprise, once I began it was painless. I didn't want to stop after half an hour, but then when I had finished my untangling, I realised it had only taken an extra ten minutes. All that procrastinating, and it was done in forty minutes!

As I unpicked and wove, I added in ideas that I've been jotting down all summer, and they began to take shape together and move the story in a better direction. It felt good; new ideas sparked and brought the whole to life.

When I put it down, I was fizzing with excitement. Today, my plot feels sweet; it is all singing in harmony. I'm still a little nervous about spoiling it when I try to capture it on paper but most of all, I can't wait to get back to it tomorrow.

So the cure for self-doubt is to push through it - must remember that next time! I wonder what the cure is for the guilt of putting writing time ahead of housework? And the guilt of letting my attention wander to made up people when it should be on my two year old?

In praise of the adverb

I was reading The Welsh Girl (Peter Ho Davies) last night, and in the early pages I was struck by the description of someone as 'violently lonely'. There was something so wholly right about it, in context, that it made my skin prickle with delight.

What is it that makes a phrase like that so expressive? I'd argue that it's the addition of that beautifully chosen adverb 'violently'  - the perfect one, as it crunches too much to be a cliche, and yet has harmony, too. I set myself the task of trying to find a similar perfect pairing, and ended up reflecting instead on how delicate a balance it is.

For instance, look at the use of 'violent' and all it's aggressive connotations. Somehow, the addition of loneliness strips it of any threat in a way that many other pairings wouldn't. I tried to think about someone being violently sad, and my mental image was of ugly sulking and throwing toys out of prams.

I wonder if part of the beauty is in pairing words that have so little obvious connection..? I tried to think about being painfully lonely, but decided that that was too near a cliche, perhaps because it is so close to 'painfully shy'. That then discounted, for me, a whole raft of similar sensory adverbs, such as excruciatingly.

I toyed briefly with 'embarrassingly lonely', but the meaning changes so quickly then that the words risk whiplash. That would introduce a whole subtext (who is embarrassed by the loneliness?) and also, to me, it has a slightly comic flavour.

Which brings me to another thing - my perception of all these words is acutely subjective. Perhaps you don't 'see' the same thing as me at all in these juxtapositions - perhaps you like and dislike completely different ones. But it was interesting, exercising my brain to strive for alternatives that might be pleasing, and it challenged my vocabulary, too.

Have you ever found a particularly pleasing phrase in a book you've read? Can you find an adverb that can adjust 'lonely' in an even more interesting direction?