Grammar
I can’t abide stranding a preposition.
Look through my blog posts and I dare you to find a sentence anywhere that has a “to”, or an “of” just hanging off there at the end.
The same is true for the split infinitive, although I am a little less rigorous with that one and you might occasionally find a sentence where I do indeed put an adverb in between the word “to” and a verb. I mean, if it was ok for Kirk to say in Star Trek “to boldly go”, I think it might be ok for me “to creatively write”.
From whence does this come?
Blame 12 years of Catholic schooling where the good Sisters seemed to believe that they would not reach heaven unless they instilled proper grammar in all their students. That, along with the fear of eternal damnation in the fires of hell they promised were yours, if you did not learn and use it properly.
They started you out early with Phonics, where you match speech sounds to written letters. Is Phonics even taught today? I got in trouble in the 1st grade, when Sister Florine was teaching Phonics, because a classmate was having trouble with it and I got out of my seat to help her. That earned me an expulsion from the classroom and being made to stand with my back against the wall in the hallway. Phonics class: one of my earliest experiences involving PTSD.
But I digress. From Phonics, we moved on to Venn Diagramming sentences. Again, is that even taught today? Nothing gave me more anxiety than when you were asked to go to the board to Venn diagram a sentence. OMG, the pressure. All those lines. Some straight, some angling off the straight ones. Subject, verb, adjective, preposition, object of preposition, article. If you didn’t know it, you didn’t know it. There was no way of faking it out of that situation. And no amount of staring at that blackboard, chalk in hand, willing it into existence, could make it happen.
The capstone of my grammar education though was 11th grade Honors English class with Sister Inez Cecilia. Sister Inez Cecilia despised stranding a preposition and felt equally strongly about the split infinitive. Many a paper were returned back to me with redlines and point deductions for such egregious infractions as those.
She’d rant endlessly on about them, warning of the dangers of using them and of the critical importance to write properly (note, that’s ‘to write properly’ not ‘to properly write’. Begone, away with ye, ye grammatical devils!).
Sister Inez Cecilia also was extremely old and on the verge of senility. But that mattered not. That’s what you called life skills training. If you can manage your way through a class with an aging, almost senile nun you can pretty much handle anything that life has to throw at you.
To Sister’s credit though, she did drill into us how to write an essay. Starting with a clear opening to establish the topic, followed by the rationale to support it, and ending it with a strong conclusion, and with nary a grammatical error to be found.
And also to her credit, here I am, 45 or so years later not stranding any prepositions or splitting any (make that many) infinitives.
However, I just googled it. And Google tells me that stranding a preposition and splitting infinitives is in fact NOT grammatically incorrect and was a “myth that came out of the Latin Rule where-in, in the 17th and 18th centuries, English grammarians tried to force English to follow Latin grammar rules.” Well, that makes sense because you know, Latin and Catholicism go together like spaghetti and meatballs. Add to that, that Sister Inez looked to be about as old as the 17th or 18th century.
Well, old habits die hard. Perhaps I might start stranding some prepositions and splitting more infinitives, since Google says it is ok to do so. Maybe.
But no one please ask me to Venn diagram a sentence.