Sunday 29 July 2012

If You Don't Change It, It Will Haunt You Forever

So irritating!

You have what you hope is your final proof of your masterpiece in your hands, you're checking it for form's sake, although you don't really want to - you're sick of reading the bloody thing! - and you think, great, no typos...

...then you see it! A grammatical blunder! Something which you know isn't strictly incorrect, but which you know you must change, or it will haunt you forever!

You go to your Word file; you muse over it. There's no green wavy line underneath the sentence crowing, 'Nah-nah, you screwed up!' You decide to research it. You check all the grammar books and web sites, but you know in your heart the preferred phrase is: 'had shown' not 'had showed'.

The grammar sites say 'showed' is OK, but they put 'shown' first...but no, it's not. You know it's 'shown'. You search for 'had showed' in Google. It says, 'Did you mean had shown'?

Damn. You have no choice, you have to correct it.

So Big Brother, which I wanted published at the beginning of August at the latest, will have to wait a while longer!

Grammatical faults are so much harder to spot than spelling typos. I think it's because we don't tend to take grammar so seriously, especially when we speak, and you can get away with a certain amount of licence in writing. Who writes like Jane Austen these days? Also fifteen-year-olds from Liverpool don't tend to speak like Elizabeth Bennett or Eleanor Dashwood!

Unless I see anything major in this latest proof in the way of glaring errors, however, that will be that. Big Brother will be released on the public in August if it kills me!


1 comment:

Unknown said...

I nominated you for the Versatile Blog Award! Check out the deets:

http://dalesplace-dale.blogspot.com/2012/08/blog-award.html