Does Grammer still matter?
Love of language can foster common ground
- Ellen Jovin and her grammar table
In “This Grammar Guru Will Solve the World’s Problems,” Katherine Rosman writes about Ellen Jovin and her efforts to bring her love of grammar to the sidewalks of New York City:
Ellen Jovin was settling in at a collapsible table she’d set up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last month when two little boys of around 4 and 5 approached her.
“What’s a gerund?” one of them asked.
Charmed, Ms. Jovin explained that a gerund is a verb that has become a noun after an -ing has been added to it. “Run” is a verb but “running” is a gerund, she told them.
“Are you related?” she then asked them.
One boy said “yes.” The other said “no.” Then they started fighting.
“No choking your brother at the Grammar Table!” Ms. Jovin shouted. “Oh, and ‘choking’ is a gerund.”
Ms. Jovin is a new member of a city subway ecosystem known for its string-instrument musicians, break-dancers and religion preachers. About four times a week, she schleps a foldable table and a chair to locations such as a triangular sidewalk plaza outside a subway entrance off 72nd Street or inside the underground expanses of Grand Central Station or Times Square and sets up the Grammar Table. Its laminated sign reads: “Vent! Comma crisis? Semicolonphobia? Conjunctive adverb addiction! Ask a question! Any language!”
Ms. Jovin, 53, knows that a better understanding of the role of conjunctions will not put a stop to political divisions. But in a world of coarse discourse, why not create a little common ground by parsing past participles? “Language studies is something people can bond over and enjoy without getting into a huge fight,” she said. (Unless you’re 4 or 5, perhaps.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/learning/does-grammar-still-matter-in-the-age-of-twitter.html
– Marcelle Rand’s Copy Wronged Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/copy_wronged/
Grammar gives structure to communication
– Gives appearance of reliability
– Shows respect to audience
– Encourages Increased Engagement
– Protects writer’s long-term reputation
https://www.thestudentop.com/post/does-grammar-still-matter-in-the-age-of-social-media
– Clues the reader in on the writer’s age
Excerpt from Twitter study:
We presented a study on the relation between the age of Twitter users and their language use. A data set was constructed by means of a fine-grained annotation effort of more than 3000 Dutch Twitter users. We studied age prediction based only on tweets. Next, we presented a detailed analysis of variables as they change with age. We approached age prediction in different ways: predicting the age category, life stage, and the actual age. Our system was capable of predicting the exact age within a margin of 4 years. Compared with humans, the automatic system performed better and was much faster than humans. For future research, we believe that life stages or exact ages are more meaningful than dividing users based on age groups.In addition, gender should not be ignored as we showed that how age is displayed in language is also strongly influenced by the gender of the person. We also found that most changes occur when people are young, and that after around 30 years the studied variables show little change. This may also explain why it is more difficult to predict the age of older people (for both humans and the automatic system). Our models were based only on the tweets of the user. This has as a practical advantage that the data is easy to collect, and thus the models can easily be applied to new Twitter users. However, a deeper investigation into the relation between language use and age should also take factors such as the social network and the direct conversation partners of the tweeters into account.
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14381/14230
Writing for Your Audience
It can be helpful to identify your audience when writing to give your work a better chance of being read.
4 Questions to Define Your Audience in Writing
Question One: Theme
Think about your stories, posts, tweets, emails, conversations, Facebook statuses, and Instagram pictures. What theme does your writing have in common?
As you look at your writing, you will hopefully see a theme. Any good writer has a very specific topic, niche, or theme that their posts, layout, tweets lend themselves to.
If you don’t see a theme, you need to establish what you want to be about.
What do you want to write about daily?
Make sure it’s something you’re very passionate about, because you could be writing about it forever!
Question Two: Demographics
What demographic does your theme appeal to?
The theme that you’ve established will likely have a type of person it appeals to, and this type person can often be defined by demographics.
Demographics include a person’s:
- age
- gender
- marital status
- income
- location
- language
Demographics can also be defined by specific hobbies or interests a person has, for example, writing, ballet, painting, hiking, or food.
Question Three: Daily Concerns
What are their daily concerns?
If you were able to answer the first two questions, you have almost established your audience (and can almost get back to writing!).
But now you need to know them on a deeper level. What are their daily preoccupations?
Do they struggle with writing? Are they overwhelmed with kids? Do they want to know how to eat healthier?
A great and simple way to find this out is to simply ask. Send out a survey to your email list. Find out what people want. Ask what they’re interested in, and how their lives look.
To send out a survey you can use a service like Survey Monkey, Google Forms, or even just a simple email that you send to a reader.
Question Four: Your Part
Nonfiction writers: How can you help? Fiction writers: What kind of stories does your audience want or need to hear?
Here’s where you come in. You’ve established who your audience will be, and now you’re going to offer your experience and expertise.
This is where you are able to establish the relationship and build trust.
How can you help? How will you help?
You CAN Find an Audience in Writing
The reality is that when you know who you’re talking to, your prose, vocabulary, and style will change. This is a good thing, because you’re figuring out how to write in such a way that it has a deep and lasting impact on their lives.
https://thewritepractice.com/audience-in-writing/
Ask yourself the following questions:
Who am I writing for? Is my audience young or old? Male or female? Are they business executives or suburban housewives?
What do they need? What do they care most about? What is irrelevant to them?
Why am I writing this piece? What do I want the reader to think, do, or feel after reading it?
What does my reader already know about this topic? Have I given them enough explanation? Or, have I given them too much explanation and, thus, insulted their intelligence?
How do they feel about this topic? How can I honor their perspective?
Sometimes we get so excited about our own ideas that we forget that creative writing is supposed to be a conversation between us and our readers. But simply by asking ourselves what their expectations are, we can avoid the trap of merely talking to ourselves.
https://sharonlechter.com/blog/2016/04/11/creative-writing-knowing-your-audience/
KC Storytellers 