The Basics are Basic

A few years ago, when I was in graduate school, I learned that Ohio doesn't require its public school teachers to know anything at all about English grammar. It shows. Many (not all) of my incoming freshmen are really, really rocky—and interestingly enough, they are rocky in the same way.

College English isn't supposed to be about learning the basics of sentence grammar. It's supposed to be about learning to say something smart. So, as soon as possible, do these things:

1. Buy a grammar handbook.
It hardly matters which one, and it doesn't have to be new. College bookstores have used ones for about half price, and if it's an older edition, they practically give them away. Many colleges are moving to online grammar books, but students often find those awkward to use, which brings up the next point: Use it!

2. Master the top 20.
Someone very helpfully read 20,000 freshman papers and gave us the top 20 grammar issues. Make sure you catch the older list at the bottom of the page. It's got examples and an explanation. I have my own list too.

3. Learn to spell.
Two or three spelling/homonym errors per page is a LOT. You need to learn how to run the spelling checker on your computer, but you also need to know its limitations. The checker won't catch homonym problems. If you never learned the difference between their, they're, and there, learn it! If you don't know the business about double consonants and long vowels, learn it. (The sentence, "I was so scarred in the dinning room that I thought I'd loose my mind," means "I was so covered with old injuries in the room where there was a lot of noise that I thought I'd release my too-tight mind." You don't eat things in a dinning room. When you are frightened, you aren't scarred unless you lose a lot of blood. And when that blood went away, you didn't loose it.)

4. Figure out sentence fragments.
They almost always arise because you didn't have the nerve to write a subordinate clause. Learn about them from the grammar handbook you bought.

5. Figure out comma splices.
I know that J.K. Rowling loves them, and so do the majority of college freshmen. Most academic readers just hate them. Go back to the grammar handbook to learn what I'm talking about.

6. Learn how to write the title of a book.
I've almost never run into a freshman who could correctly include the title of a book in a paper. Look it up in your grammar handbook. While you're at it, learn what to do with the title of a short story, poem, or magazine article. (You should have learned this one in about the fourth grade.) By the way, J.K. Rowling's first book was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. One of the most well-known poems by Robert Frost is "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." There. That was easy, wasn't it?

7. Figure out apostrophes.
It's a very simple rule, really, and you'll find it in that grammar handbook. You need to learn how to write possessives, simple plurals, and common third-person verbs.

None of this is brain surgery. All of it should have been in place before you got out of the sixth grade. Teachers, however, seem to have other things on their minds in public schools, so native-born students arrive at college with less ability to write correct English than the immigrant who arrived yesterday.

None of what I said here will give you a good paper—just a legal one. It's like rats and cockroaches. One of the basics of running a restaurant is to keep the rats and cockroaches out. Being vermin-free doesn't guarantee a good restaurant: both the fancy French place and the sandwich shop should be free of rats. But you don't want to eat at the gourmet restaurant that's overrun with filth.