"Grammar is a piano I play by ear ... "
Posted: April 23rd, 2014, 12:59 pm
I came upon this quote when I solved a simple cryptogram in this morning's newspaper, then searched out the fuller text and source, which is Joan Didion's essay/lecture, entitled, "Why I Write". Here's the whole paragraph in question:
I think one reason I found this so appealing is that it chimes in with my recently-acquired conviction that grammatical analysis is secondary to the reading and writing of a text. But there's something in that thought of the arrangement of words in a composition as a music played by ear that fascinates me. Any who may like to read the original essay/lecture can download it at http://people.bridgewater.edu/~atrupe/ENG310/Didion.pdfGrammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene.*
It tells you.
You don’t tell it.