While a college student at the New School in New York City, Melissa Febos spent four years working as a dominatrix in a Midtown dungeon. She's the author of the highly acclaimed memoir  about that time, Whip Smart, and currently is co-curator and host of the Mixer Reading and Music Series. She teaches at SUNY Purchase College and The Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

As both a writer and teacher, she has a deep understanding of grammar, syntax, and punctuation and how to play with them, and I was delighted to ask her about her work.

Ellen Scordato: What does “grammar” mean to you? As a teacher, what’s the main point you try to communicate to your students about grammar? And do you have a favorite bit of grammar lore you like to let them in on?

Melissa Febos: I have developed a great affection for grammar as a writer, but even more as a teacher. I dropped out of high school, and for that matter, don’t remember being taught much grammar even as an elementary school student, but I was always a voracious reader. So while I didn’t, for most of my life, know the names of parts of speech, I had a pretty unerring intuitive knowledge of grammar, from having digested so many sentences. But as a teacher, you can’t base your writing curriculum on “yes, that looks correct, but no, that doesn’t.”

So I learned the names for what was correct and what wasn’t as I had to teach them. As a result, my awareness of how grammar functions in creative writing grew enormously. For me, grammar isn’t merely a function of clarity, but also of creative precision. Grammar is commonly thought of as the arithmetic of language, but I consider it part of the art—on par with metaphor, lyricism, voice, and plot; just as diction, syntax, and paragraph length determine style, so does grammar.

I teach my students that writing is all about choices; every word, punctuation, and line-break should be a mindful decision, with the goal of rendering your form and content congruent. It isn’t always a choice between correct or incorrect; a dash and a comma may both be correct grammatically, but creatively one is going to be a stronger choice. Without a knowledge of the effect each mark has on a reader, you cannot make those decisions mindfully. I encourage my students to eschew the conventions of grammar if it suits their work, but insist that they cannot do so mindfully unless they understand the logic of those rules before they subvert them.  

ES: Are there any authors whom you particularly admire for their ways with grammar and syntax?

MF: Well, David Foster Wallace was a genius of grammar. I tell my students that there is no such thing as a run-on sentence, only a poorly constructed sentence. A whole book can be one long sentence, if the writer doesn’t lose the reader. DFW knew how to write a lengthy, sophisticated, clear sentence. Nabokov as well. And Jeanette Winterson. Don’t get me started on Virginia Woolf. Every writer whom I admire knew (or knows) how to employ grammar and syntax in novel ways. They didn’t just blindly follow the rules, but tested them, and when they departed from them, it didn’t read like a mistake, but as an inspiration.

MF: As a writer, is there a grammar point that always trips you up? Is there one you feel you could just do without?

ES: If I feel I can do without a point of grammar, I do. 

It took me a long time to fully grasp the that/which issue; I have given up trying to teach it. If my students leave my class knowing how to correctly use a semicolon, I feel successful. The semicolon is my favorite punctuation mark. The dash comes in a close second.

One giant pet peeve is the way that web formatting has crept into “regular” writing. Word processing software now often automatically formats documents with an extra space between paragraphs, and doesn’t make it easy to change that setting. This drives me bananas! White space on a page is such an important tool for writers, and should always be a thoughtful choice, never a default one, or one your computer should make for you. Extra space between paragraphs is one of the only ways to signify silence in prose, or a shift in tone, topic, or time. 

Thanks, Melissa! I have to say I completely agree about David Foster Wallace—a "genius of grammar" indeed, and Nabokov and Winterson are among my top five faves as well. The semicolon is my favorite punc mark, too, although I'm probably more fond of the that/which distinction than Melissa. Still, I realize how very superficial that issue is, and confined to this side of the Atlantic in any case. Ahh, I could talk all day about grammar!

So, gentle readers, which writers do YOU admire for their grammar?

Ellen Scordato has 25 years' book publishing experience as an editor, copy editor, proofreader, and managing editor. She's now a partner in The Stonesong Press, a nonfiction book producer and agency. In addition to her work at Stonesong, Ellen has taught grammar, punctuation, and style at the New School for more than 12 years in the English Language Studies department and is currently teaching English as a Second Language at Cabrini Immigrant Services.