Verbal Wardrobe Maintenance

So, we talked last time about the idea of casual and formal writing, as filtered through a wardrobe analogy. (A good image that I can only say I wish I’d thought of myself.) I want people’s writing style to be neat and clean, not all tattered and ragged around the edges. I’m happy with people wearing the verbal equivalent of blue jeans, as long as they’re neat blue jeans. I’m not going about my day wearing gowns and white gloves–nor do I speak as if I were–but I still want to present myself as a person who cares about the impression she makes.

So–assuming that you want your daily verbal skills to be of the neat, presentable, blue jeans variety–how do you figure out which grammar rules you need to follow? The ones that will keep your wardrobe in neat shape?

• Reading. As always, one of the very best ways to learn the correct usage of words, and how they are best strung together, is to READ. Unless you spend your free time doing historical re-enactments, you probably don’t want to speak like a character out of Charles Dickens on a regular basis, but the man knew how to put a sentence together. Read as much, and as widely, as you possibly can. Just like seeing a girl walk by in a tacky outfit, you will quickly come to appreciate the good writing from the bad.
• Television/Media. Hearing how your peers speak is also important–and by “peers,” I mean “other people on the planet.” Clearly there’s a huge variety of different speech patterns all over television and radio–but the more you listen to the variety out there, the more your ear will pick up the flexibility of the language. You know, just like when you were absorbing all the basic rules when you were a toddler listening to the grown-ups talk.
• Speeches. Clearly a politician delivering a speech is going to speak differently than a clergyman delivering sermon–or the kid delivering your pizza–but listening to words formally put together is like watching Fred Astaire dance in a tuxedo. It might not be something you’re ever called on to do yourself, but, well, you have to have something to aspire to. (And who wouldn’t like to be able to dance like Fred Astaire?
• Conversation. The real crux of language–basic communication at its best. Or, at least, its most common. Our high-speed era doesn’t allow the care with conversation as earlier centuries did, but being able to explain what you are thinking to another person is really the whole point of a language, and yet it allows for more flexibility than any more formal form. Teenage girls giggling over a cute boy, teenage boys grunting over a video game, doting mothers raving over their children, excited men going over the latest game scores … straight, one-on-one verbal communication is where the action is, if you’re looking for variety.
• Email and Letters. Written personal communication is almost a hybrid between conversation and published matter–it’s not as immediate as talking face-to-face, but it allows for more casual usage of the rules than writing for the general public. This is one of the reasons reading other peoples’ letters can be so much fun–not only do they talk about things they wouldn’t mention in public, but there isn’t the same pressure to write to exacting standards, either.

Ultimately, the best way to learn to use any language is to USE it. Studying grammar books and usage guides might help, but they can only teach the language if you want to sound like a text book. If you want to be able to speak to people in anything other than a 3-piece suit kind of way, you need to be comfortable with all the variations. Or at least, acknowledge that they’re there. I’m certainly not spending any of my time trying to learn whatever jargon teenagers are using these days, but at least I’m aware that they’re stretching the ways English is used–just like they’re stretching the limits of basic wardrobe pieces.

And, um, no, I don’t really want to dress like them, either (grin).