100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Respect the rules of grammar
Ten ways to avoid grammatical errors

To succeed as a writer, you must respect the rules of grammar. If editors or teachers have consistently found grammatical errors in your writing, the flaw in your work is not minor. It is fatal. Good writing and good grammar are not twins, but they are usually found in the same place.

The rules of grammar exist to help you write well, not to sabotage your work, and you cannot write well without them. The rules of grammar organize the language just as the rules of arithmetic organize the world of numbers. Imagine how difficult math would be if three and three equaled six only once in a while or if a tenth was equal to ten percent only when somebody felt like it. Grammatical rules about tense, gender, number, person, and case provide us with a literary currency that we can spend wherever English is spoken or read. Grammar is a system of rules for speaking and writing a given language, and that system was not created just so that English teachers would have something to harass you about. It exists so that we can communicate well, and when you blatantly violate portions of the system, you are chipping away at the stability of the whole.

While you should accept the fact that changes do occur in the language, you should also resist each change every step of the way. Change should not come easily. New words and constructions seeking entry into the language should be met by a mighty army of grammarians saying, “It’s wrong,” and the rest of us saying, “It just doesn’t sound right,” so that the trendy, the senseless, and the merely pretty fall dead on the battlefield, and only the truly valuable survive. Change, if I might switch my metaphor, should come gradually and rarely, or the language will fall like a table that has all its legs removed at once instead of replaced one at a time.