Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

I'm currently reading Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss. I have completed the introduction and the first chapter on the apostrophe. I'm ankle-deep in the second chapter, covering the comma. Here are my two favorite observations:

1. Various grammar books have various rules. Some say "Keats's poem" is correct. Others say "Keats' poem" is correct. I love that. The rulemakers can't even agree on the rules. How then can we expect non-rulemaking college students to follow them?

Everybody always comes in asking about grammar. One student came in today with a sheet of feedback from his teacher. Nowhere in that feedback did she mention anything about his grammar. She asked for focus, for clarification, for specifics, but said nothing of commas or sentence structure. I read the feedback and read over his essay. His teacher was 100% correct, and as I began to discuss her feedback with him, he waved his hand over his paper and asked if I could just look at it and tell him about his grammar.

I don't him he doesn't care about grammar at this point and explained that ideas come first. Most people think in this manner: writing=grammar. That is not true. Grammar is an aspect, not everything. I think that is driven home by Keats's poem/Keats' poem; does it really--really--matter? Not particularly. We still know who wrote the lines.

2. Truss quotes Sir Ernest Gowers: "The use of commas cannot be learned by rule." True. I can't remember a single writing student who learned where to put a comma based on an explanation of a rule. Rule + example is the minimum. The rule is theory, but the example is practice.

I can always tell readers when they come in. Their sentences bounce and flow with rhythm. They can't necessarily explain the placement of a comma, but they usually don't need to because their commas are properly placed. They have seen the tool in use enough to understand how it functions in live action.

This is same way I learned to use a semicolon. I saw enough of them in print and it sunk in that they pair sentences.