Here's why you should never feel insecure in your grammar knowledge

A student posting in the grammar forum on Reddit recently made me sad:  “I’m a college student majoring in a scientific field and am interested in conducting my own research. One thing that’s stopping me is my lack of vocabulary and not being great with grammar. Grammar has always been a problem and I don’t know where to even start. I also want to improve my vocabulary so my papers can sound more professional. I can comprehend scientific journal articles, make lit reviews and understand the statistics. I just don’t feel confident in my writing. I’m looking for an app or website that’s almost like Duolingo so I can enjoy learning between classes and work. Any help would be appreciated!”

Notice that this student used not one, not two, but eight perfectly grammatical sentences to say that their grammar is bad — so bad that it’s standing in the way of pursuing dreams in a scientific field. It’s as if this poor student thinks there’s some secret body of knowledge required to write well and that this knowledge is hard to access.

Grammar has this effect on a lot of people. Decades of misinformation about what it means to speak and write “properly” have terrified the bejesus out of generations of students. But the truth is, if you’re fluent in English, you don’t need to know terms like dangling participle and predicate nominative. Here are four reasons you’re already great at grammar.

1. You understand subject-verb agreement. If the Reddit poster had written “I be a college student” or “I are a college student” or “I is a college student,” your grammar alarm would have gone off. That’s because, instinctively, you know that verbs agree with their subjects. Singular first-person “I” goes with “am,” whereas second-person “you” goes with “are,” and so on. More impressive: You have no problem with how the poster wrote “one thing that’s stopping me is,” even though not one but two things were listed afterward. That may be illogical, but it’s perfectly grammatical, which is why you would have balked at “one thing that’s stopping me are.”

2. You know that “ing” verbs can be nouns, too. You might even know these are called gerunds. For example, you understood “I can enjoy learning” as easily as you understand “I enjoy books.” A thing you enjoy is a noun, and that can be a physical thing like books or a gerund like learning. The fact that gerunds look identical to verbs in their progressive participle form, “I am learning,” didn’t trip you up even for a second.

3. You’re a master of coordinate verb phrases. The poster’s first sentence has just one subject, “I,” but it uses “am” twice (the first time in its contracted form ’m). I am a student and am interested. Because you know that verbs and even whole predicates can share a single subject when they’re coordinated with “and,” you had no confusion about who was interested.

4. You get that adverbs can move around sometimes. When you read “I don’t know where to even start,” you 100% got the poster’s meaning. And if they had written, “I don’t even know where to start,” you would have been just as clear. But at the same time, you know that “even I don’t know where to start” would have completely changed the meaning of the sentence and that “I even don’t know” would have been nonsensical. That’s because you know that adverbs like “even” can move around. When they do, sometimes the meaning changes drastically, and sometimes it changes not at all. And, amazingly, you can understand their meaning or lack thereof at any location in the sentence.

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