I was never taught the rules of grammar at school. I have no idea what any of the tenses are called. I just write by instinct.
I seem to have got away with it so far, but there's always this sense of anxiety. Particularly as I do write a lot of stories with complex nested flashbacks...
The lure of the past perfect... when is it too much? Especially for writing for US audiences and they don't know what it is.
ReplyDeleteI didn't learn what a perfect tense was til I did my TEFL course, post degree. I resent it a lot that some govt official decided for me that I didn't need to learn grammar. I think it's one reason why the Irish are such bad language learners. We don't really get how they work. We learn grammar inately, they say. Well, I'm lucky, in that I had parents who were able to use it well, but my inlaws say 'I seen it' and 'I don't it' because that's what they learned inately. Such a stupid theory! Bring back Latin, I say :)
We'll have a tense overview the next time we meet, it'll be fun :)
I'm absolutely certain that the reason I ended up completely failing to learn German was that they never bothered to teach us English grammar.
ReplyDeleteI agree - I so wish we'd been taught proper grammar.
ReplyDeleteI got away with it, mostly, but shit - the laissez-faire attitude *particularly* disadvantages children from poorer and less-educated family backgrounds. If you only learn language "innately" then you learn it from your family.
*oops*, that should have been 'I seen it and I done it' in my post above. Not sure why my fingers do this to me. Perhaps because I learned typing innately!
ReplyDelete