Good Grammar
I’m the product of my education, grammatically speaking. For me, like many who were educated after slate and chalk became unfashionable, as far as English grammar was concerned, a conjunction was a planetary event occasionally mentioned in the astrology column, and a split infinitive was something to do with Star Trek. I think Scottie used one to power up the warp drive in series three. Once the basics of doing, naming and describing words had been covered, my high school English classes were devoted to over-analysing and over-acting Shakespeare. Along the way we wrote some short stories and somehow picked up the grammatical rules we needed in order to be understood. This system developed in the progressive atmosphere of the swingin’ sixties. Educators who had suffered through the drumming of archaic rules into their heads as children, used the spirit of the times to re-imagine the school system. Creative writing henceforth became the tool through which grammar was to be learnt, provi...