Sitting in class with your friends sitting around you, your teacher at the chalkboard, and the screeching chalk sliding up and down the green board—mostly in vertical lines but sometimes horizontally—and the only thing you wanted to do was go outside and play.

Remember this?

Welcome back to grade school.

Nouns, verbs, sentence diagramming, oh my!

Nouns, verbs, sentence diagramming, oh my!

Me personally, I hated it, but looking back I realize how important it all was. I doubt if it was ever essential, or is now, that we know what a gerund is, but that we know that there is more than “Polly chirped” to the English language—“Polly,” being the noun and “chirped,” being the verb.

Now, here we are, ten, twenty, thirty, forty years later. Time has gone on, the skills, for the most part, forgotten. But say, we want to write a book, a poem, a screen play, a short article on the history of our quaint town for the small newspaper down the street! And we have a million sixth grade English text books lying on the shelf, collecting dust, giving off carbon as they decay.

Here’s the kicker; the joke’s on us.

If you are serious about writing, writing anything from a simple rhyme to a complex book with deep characters and complicated plot twists, you better know the basics of the English language—and not just “Polly chirped”—if you’re going to get anywhere near an editor’s desk. I’ll say that the odds are against you, but I’ve heard that good writing beats all odds, and good writing starts with a mastery of all there is English.

This article is for those serious about the craft of writing. Maybe you want to become a poet, a journalist, a novelist—it doesn’t matter. But if you want to see your name in print some place other than your school’s year book, and want to make money doing it, you have to start taking language (grammar and punctuation, style and William Strunk Jr.) seriously.

Here is why: No matter how good your plot is, and no matter how realistic your characters are, and no matter how well you capture the flow like a dam captures a raging river, you will be rejected by everyone if you can’t successfully and consistently dot your I’s and cross your T’s. Half a writer’s job is to know what he is doing with the page before him. Some writers think they can just slap some words together and it’s already ready for print. Then these writers wonder why they’ve never been published. Most editors and agents and publishers that I’ve read about don’t even read the stories they get right away, they skim them. They search for reasons to reject a story and their reasons are clear. They understand that if you’re too lazy to embrace, love, and nurture the language that made Faulkner and Hemingway immortal, than you’re not ready to be immortal with them.

Unless you’re writing for your eyes only—and if you are, I doubt you’re reading this—you must be writing for your reader. Your reader must be able to understand everything that is on the page before him. Clarity and punctuality reign supreme between authors and readers. There is only one way to breach the line from obscurity into the world of precision. You have to understand the medium in which you are working with, as the sculptor knows the rock or clay, and the painter is one with the colors and hues. Why should anyone take you seriously if you can’t climb the stairs to work but want to be able to climb Mount Everest? The same goes for writing. No one in their right mind will take you seriously if you aren’t serious about editing and making your stories come alive with clarity, your poems live up to precision, or your articles stand out with perfect punctuation.

You could have all of the original plots, the most well intentioned themes, and the most real and in your face characters, but when the day is done, if you don’t care what a gerund is and still feel that sentence diagramming never meant anything, you should turn on your pc and start typing up that job application because it’s going to be the only piece of writing anyone will ever take you seriously with.