Forget Grammar - Real Writing Comes From the Gut

Somewhere in the dark and dusty depths of my memory, there lies a piece of English homework I completed when I was about 11 years old. The details elude me, but it was definitely some kind of creative writing assignment, in which I’d written a certain line:

“One moment I was walking through the school gates – then the next thing I know, I’m flat on my back with Bully McMeanieface looming over me.”

Pretty good, right? It’s a wonder I wasn’t nominated for the 2006 Booker Prize.

But what feedback did my teacher provide for this glorious and extremely evocative sentence? The words glittered on the page in shiny red ink: DON’T MIX TENSES.

Luckily, 11-year-old Vi was filled with a level of cockiness I wish I still possessed. My instinctive response was simply: ‘That’s dumb, my sentence was absolutely fine’. And now, with thirty years of life under my belt, and a career built on writing words, I can confirm I was completely right.

But you know who doesn’t have the unearned confidence of all nine Greek muses and Kanye West combined? My own 11-year-old daughter. She’s unfortunate enough to have graduated primary school and entered the vicious torture gauntlet of secondary education – which (among other things) brings the ever-present spectre of homework. I recently had the pleasure of helping her with an English assignment. A simple online quiz, one that we could breeze through together and go back to our chill weekend within ten minutes. OR SO I THOUGHT.

I was dismayed and humbled to be grilled on the difference between simple, complex and compound sentences; asked to identify independent and subordinate clauses; and bombarded with types of word from pronouns and verbs to prepositions and conjunctions. Now, I’m not saying that there’s zero value to be found in learning these distinctions. But for young kids who (probably) haven’t yet discovered a passion for writing, is this really the way to be nurturing their creative spark? Dry, context-free rules that they’ll struggle to connect in any meaningful way to the stories they love?

I couldn’t help but be reminded of my own experience with homework at that age, and my teacher’s indignation that I’d break his beloved “rules”. The line I wrote is conversational, it conveys a sense of personality and character from the narrator, and while I didn’t exactly sit down as a tiny child and think “hmm, I think I’ll mix tenses here to convey a sense of disorientation”, it was nevertheless a deliberate choice that I made for the reason that it felt right. I didn’t consult my notes on grammar rules and plan perfectly structured sentences, and I sure as heck didn’t know my independent from my subordinate clauses. It was an expression of the deep gut wisdom that writing is communication, and communication is about conveying something beyond the words themselves. Ultimately how words feel is a thousand times more important than following the letter of the law of language.

All this to say, knowing the mechanics of English doesn’t make you a good writer. The right words only reveal themselves once they are read, and it can be a struggle to find them if you’re not used to the process. That’s why people like me exist – copywriters regularly exercise their language muscles so they don’t atrophy, honing our instincts to find a killer phrase that may break some rules, but still reads perfectly to the right audience. Not to bang the same worn and battered drum, but this is another reason AI has no place in copywriting. It has no instincts. It just steals a bunch of content (passively cannibalising a sea of AI-generated slop in the process), chugs a bajillion gallons of water and acts like it made something original. ChatGPT? More like Chat Pee-Pee-Wee.

Now that’s the kind of writing you can only get from an intelligent creative human.