Are Grammar Nazis Ruining Storytelling?

Ever get excited to get a personal rejection just to find it full nick picks about your grammar choices and punctuation? I mean this is fiction. I consider story telling akin to poetry, the grammar and punctuation serve the story, not the other way around. This isn’t business proposal or a five paragraph essay. Sure if you didn’t do it for a reason you should probably pay attention to the suggestions. But, especially in dialog, punctuation, spelling, and grammar serve to show character dialect, pacing, intellect, and to differentiate one character from the next. I get the feeling with today’s grammar Nazis, one of the greatest openings of all time “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” would never have made it to print. I can imagine some modern editor reading that and thinking; “This Dickens guy knows nothing about writing”.

I have personally received critiques telling me I need to add or delete commas from my dialog. Of course everyone misses things, but often it is for pacing, maybe the character talks slow and pauses between words, or speaks fast and doesn’t pause at all. Besides that, for me, if a comma, period, or other punctuation is missing on a story I like and accept, I just add it before it gets printed. Kinda the job of an editor. See what I did there, used a slang word, didn’t spell it wrong, not a grammar mistake, done intentionally for effect. I have also been told once that I described the physiology of my character incorrectly, on an alien species I made up. Huh? I recently had a critique that told me that my sentence describing a spaceship, “A huge metallic manta, its wings studded with ion cannons, searched space for prey.” was incorrect. That manta is Spanish for blanket and I needed to use “manta ray” to be correct. I guess someone took high school Spanish. Manta in Spanish can mean blanket, rug, shawl, or devilfish depending on the context of the sentence. On top of that manta, without the word ray, is a common English shortening for manta ray.

I think one of the problems is with the word critique itself, and this brings me to one of my pet peeves; the term critical thinking. These words carry baggage with them. I am a proponent of saying readers should analyze stories not critique them. People should use analytical thinking not critical thinking. While these terms should be interchangeable, they are not. The words critique and critical thinking bring a subconscious implication to find fault, to look for errors, and ignore all else. Analytical thinking, or to analyze implies to look at the whole, to see all, to compare and contrast. You still find the mistakes, but you also might find something good otherwise missed. So next time you get a grammar nazi rejection, think about it, if you didn’t do it intentionally they are probably right. If you had a reason, take solace, you are probably right. It won’t get you published. Sort of like knowing you were right after you get run over by a truck in the crosswalk, but still you were, right!