Correctness

I've never been a fan of grammar. Which makes many question why I chose English as my major, considering the fact that grammar is, well, important. Luckily, I read a lot as a kid, so I just picked up my grammar along the way. Sadly, I didn't have many grammar lessons that I can recall in early grades, nor did I have many lessons in High School...perhaps the lack of practice made me dislike it. Last year I took my first real Grammar class. It was interesting, because for the first time I was required to explain WHY commas were placed in certain spots, and what they did to the sentence, etc. It was difficult to grasp many ideas due to my lack of grammar knowledge growing up, but with work, I was able to do OK.
When reading about correctness this week, the book started off by saying, "Too much concern about correctness can inhibit your writing; too little concern can come between y9ou and your readers. Don't let the fear of errors dominate the experience of writing for you." (2). This was my kind of book. Hundreds of times I'll start a paper and get stuck on things like spelling or use of colon, and have to look them up. Great. I find an answer, but by the time I do, I've completely lost my train of thought. I find myself getting caught up in errors before they've been made, and this considerably slows down my writing. I think that this has something to do with the fact that I'm the type of reader that picks up on every error, and often get hung-up on it, ignoring the point of the work and focussing on the mistakes that could have easily been corrected.
So correctness is important, because it makes writing more credible, but I feel that free-writing should come first. Some of the best ideas generated are the first, and it is important to get them down on paper and correct and work with them later. The book defines freewriting as, "dinding your ideas by writing with no plan, quickly, without stopping. Don't worry about what to say first"(60). I feel that this concept is more important that anything else because it is what makes us writers, not where we put our commas.