Because I have never been an ‘expert’ at grammar and mechanics, I always pay attention to them. It is almost a built-in instinct that I learned many years ago due to my own cultural insecurities. I come from a family where most of us speak in either southern accents or Black English, so when I had to write essays for class, my papers would be filled with grammatical, word usage, and mechanical errors. I was often frustrated because my parents did not have great educations, and my older siblings were more into the Black Power movement (which meant resistance against our cultural norms).
Being a middle child, this left me at a disadvantage at school, and I had to work hard to learn grammar. One ‘trick’ that I learned many moons ago was to emulate news reporters and other professionals in the media because I felt that it was their job to know how to speak and write well. While there are still some holes in my knowledge, I understand grammar and mechanics as being anything associated with punctuation, spelling, and word usage. I am not sure how I came to this understanding, but I suspect that it may be because this is what I was taught in English class. Grammar was always a boring chore and I can still remember the angry looks that some of my teachers had when I didn't get it quite right. The beauty of my struggle, though, is that while I am not a huge fan of grammar, I absolutely love expressing myself in writing and reading beautiful prose.
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