Is Grammar A Myth?
An Argument for Retelling the Rules
Back in fifth grade—a time long before I wanted to be a copyeditor, when all I dreamed of doing was reading the next Percy Jackson book—I made a world-shattering discovery: my English teachers were liars. Grammar wasn’t real.
Or at least, the rules of it weren’t.
None of my friends diagrammed sentences at their public schools like I did at my Catholic school. We all lived within a fifteen-minute radius of each other’s homes and spoke virtually the same Philadelphian-suburbia-type-jawn, so I couldn’t understand why one school would teach English any differently than another did. The girls down the street poked fun at me when I texted them in full sentences that reflected the punctuation and capitalization I rehearsed in loopy cursive letters after every Friday church service.
Reading whatever modern myth-retelling I secretly had cracked open in my lap during math class, I noticed that even my favorite published authors didn’t follow the rules in my English workbooks. My mind tripped over simple sentences in Percy Jackson and The Last Olympian. A line like “Every time I’m around you, some monsters attack us. What’s to be nervous about?” was not technically correct. Prepositions didn’t belong at the end of sentences. I regularly corrected what I assumed were mistakes in my books, realizing only after staring at my pen mark for a moment that my edits sounded unnatural. Why on earth would Rachel Dare ever ask “About what is there to be nervous?” People looked mildly annoyed when I answered their “How are you doing?” niceties with an enthusiastic “Well!” A monster would have (and maybe should have) attacked Rachel just for bumbling out that mouthful. But did that mean we were all just… talking wrong?
In 2005, Arnold Zwicky coined the term “zombie rule” to explain the arbitrary language rules that don’t have any grammatical, historical, or literary basis, but are kept alive by life-or-death style sheets and grammar checkers. Editor Erin Brenner has also written extensively about slaying these zombies, quoting instances of “they” as a singular noun from records as far back as 1523 and lines from Shakespeare’s works that use double negatives. She describes some grammar myths as “stylistic choices.” Others, she calls “made-up nonsense to make English work more like Latin,” harkening back to the 16th century when standard English was first formally taught in schools. Teachers modeled their English grammar lessons in the style of Latin grammar conventions, which most of them already had experience teaching. The origins of the modern English language are complicated and convoluted, and their oddities still linger in our language today.
At the start of seventh grade, I transferred from the catholic school to my local public school and promptly failed my first essay. My identity as the bookish, nerdy girl threatened to crack and crumble before my eyes as my teacher pulled me aside after class to ask why I hadn’t properly formatted my essay in MLA. After sniffling that I didn’t know what she meant and had never written like that at my old school, she quickly set me up with one of the writing tutors to learn what she told me were “MLA style guide expectations.”
The purpose of grammar is to communicate clearly and concisely, but in seventh grade, nothing about this new cookie-cutter writing style looked any clearer or more concise than my original essay writing method. How was I reading The Odyssey in my free time but struggling to write in English class? The next day, instead of going to English, a spindly old woman with pointy purple nails and glasses attached to a beaded necklace brought me down to a room without windows and instructed me to reformat my essay header and replace any contractions with their long form.
Depending on which grammarian you consult, grammar can have either rules or patterns. This discourse exists because grammarians ascribe to one of two approaches to studying language: prescriptivism or descriptivism. While prescriptivists focus on how language should look, descriptivists focus on how language does look. Prescriptivists believe in grammar conventions. They attribute correctness and incorrectness to grammar per Standard English, which was developed by Britain's church and state. Rules are helpful. New language learners need some sort of framework to start from. Or, I should say, from which to start.
Meanwhile, descriptivists argue that no language use is inherently wrong, so long as it can be understood. These grammarians defend supposed errors in Standard English like using the word “fewer” instead of “less” to describe stars because, in most rooms, no one would know the difference.
Once the new rules of MLA were explained to me, I picked them up surprisingly quickly. I could fill in the outline of a five-paragraph essay like it was an algebraic equation, subbing in my thesis, statement of development, and transition sentence as x, y, and z to find my solution: an introductory paragraph. It was a little redundant, but I didn’t care, because I’d started getting A’s again.
For high school, I attended an IB STEM magnet school where most students around me were too excited about balancing equations and building robots to engage in philosophical discourse about the purpose and meaning of grammar. Grammar was considered more challenging but less important in these classrooms, where my classmates struggled to identify the difference between passive and active voice and frequently forgot how to use commas. They were all geniuses. Grammar just didn’t interest them. Meanwhile, I was slowly coming to terms with the reality that I didn’t enjoy my physics experiments as much as I did my grammar review lessons.
Having already learned from my transition to public school, I continued to tailor my writing to each of our English teachers’ preferences, no matter how frustrating I found them. Mr. Philips hated the word “it,” and wouldn’t stand for any use of “this” or “that” without a noun immediately following the word. Miss Bray hated em dashes and always needed us to make a new, expanded claim in our conclusion paragraph. She hated a paper that restated its thesis. Mr. Dowell didn’t mind contractions, but Mr. McNamera did. Each teacher insisted that their rules were gospel.
Before long, it became my job to edit all my writing-adverse peers’ essays to help “correct” their mistakes. I loved doing it. I began daydreaming of a future where I proofread and copyedited for a living. But as I found myself struggling to defend my edits to my classmates—some of which were purely stylistic opinions that I happened to share with our teachers—doubt set in. MLA didn’t specify much in terms of grammatical style, other than when to write out numbers and dates. With what grammar bible could I prove that their semicolon simply had to go? I was their peer, not their style guide. I had no real authority over language. So why did my teachers?
My obsession with understanding the ethics, history, and logic behind grammar landed me in one of the only publishing and editing undergraduate programs in the country, here at Susquehanna University. I became fascinated that my friends in the creative writing department largely rejected the idea of grammar altogether, going on about how “art subverts expectations” and “rules exist to be broken.” Collaborating with them on literary journals and publications, I began rethinking my editorial process. No longer could I proofread their pieces based on my personal and stylistic preferences alone. I needed proper justification for any change I made, and to stick to that change throughout the entire publication, whether that meant reversing the order of two adjectives or replacing a semicolon with a period. I couldn’t tailor my peers’ writing to Mr. McNamera’s or Miss Bray’s rules, so who was I tailoring it to? Who was my audience?
In my senior year of college, I became the managing editor of a small publication called RiverCraft, Susquehanna University’s oldest literary magazine. After a little digging in the library and a great deal of questioning my poor professors, I discovered there had never been a style guide for the publication. I found myself mentally returning to my seventh-grade English literature classroom, clutching an essay with angry red marks, confused over the purpose of a style guide. Because now I got it. I realized that to do things right, I needed to make a style guide from scratch.
Staring at the blank Word page, I pushed myself to return to the basics. What rules confused me as a middle schooler? What rules confused me today? Which ones came naturally, and why? Once I realized that this style guide only belonged to our publication, that it was not the end-all-be-all, everything clicked. Grammar became world-building.
I decided I wanted to be considerate to readers. Nouns can be made into verbs, but how do we keep them consistent? Sure, we can print the entire piece in lowercase, but how can we use punctuation to make the text accessible? Which grammar conventions should we keep for clarity’s sake? As I explained to my RiverCraft staff, if we must have rules, we also must continue checking their pulse. Should we capitalize this word? Is this the correct term? Is the language that we’re using how our peers write and speak? Is it how people outside our campus community write and speak? Or are we just writing for the undead?
Once I finished assembling the style guide for RiverCraft, I found myself at an unexpected conclusion.
Grammar is a myth in the same way that the story of Achilles or Hercules is. There are some historical truths to it—maybe even some scientific, cognitive truths—but they are all embellished with some crazy twists and frivolous flair to explain human curiosities we don’t yet understand. Athena is born from her father’s head. Sentences can end with a preposition. Grammar, like a myth, is a retelling. And while I can’t change a grammar myth, every time I copyedit, I get to choose how to retell it.
Ellie Pasquale (she/her) is a recent graduate of Susquehanna University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Publishing & Editing. She was the 2023-2024 managing editor of RiverCraft literary magazine and an executive member of the founding chapter of the Forum for Undergraduate Student Editors. Now, she serves as the community outreach coordinator for Susquehanna University Press. Ellie is an enthusiast of lignin, the em dash, and stories about vampires that aren’t really vampires. You can find her on Instagram @ellie.anna.pasquale.