Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more.
Quick Note: My mother taught me grammar with Wren & Martin textbook and a simple rule: speak out loud when you write. 15 years later, I'm using AI voice dictation tools to do exactly that but for different reasons. This essay traces my journey from red squiggly lines in MS Word to Grammarly's corrections to Wispr Flow's voice-to-text. Here's what I learned: In an age where AI slop floods the internet and quietly reshape our sentences, speaking out loud might be the last defense against homogenized thinking. Grammar isn't just rules—it's how we think.
When I was in school, my mother taught spoken English classes. Those were the days when you actually had to be present to learn something. 'Being present' wasn't a mindfulness buzzword because words like doomscrolling or brainrot never existed. Thus, students turned up without distractions, aiming to improve their communication skills.
Mamma had battered stacks of grammar textbooks piled on the bookshelves. She'd refer to them when teaching students. Sometimes I'd flip through to see what she taught. That's when I encountered one of her grammar books: the thick red Wren & Martin. It had exercises on nouns, verbs, active voice, passive voice, conjunctions, punctuations, adjectives, and more. Mamma would occasionally tell me to work on them. If I did them right, she'd mark it 10/10 and draw a tiny heart with 'R' inside or scribble 'Ryu'. Those were the foundational days of how I became a journalist.
Looking back now, I realize how grammar has evolved. In the book by Rebecca Lee, "How Words Get Made: The Story of Making a Book," she writes:
Without grammar, words mean nothing and they need the subtle assistance of punctuation to lend even more nuance. Punctuation reveals the relationship between words, the emotions we want a sentence to convey, and gives us breathing space - pauses- between ideas we encounter as we read. Ultimately, all words rely on the scaffolding of punctuation and grammar to take them from good to better… The Greek word for grammar translates as the 'art of letters' - and that's how we should think of it: as an art form without which our words and letters can't reach their full potential.
After stumbling through such grammar books at home, I graduated to devouring fiction novels from Eswari Lending Library. My brothers and I read stacks of Dan Brown, James Patterson, Lee Child, Stephen King, Tintin, Asterix and Obelix or Enid Blyton. Mamma would read Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon. She had the habit of underlining certain sentences or dialogues to learn the grammatical style of these authors. Mamma's lesson was obvious: Learning grammar is a constant effort made through consistent reading and speaking.
During the final leg of my school days, we got a secondhand laptop from a cousin, and I used its MS Word to write short stories. I recall getting upset whenever I noticed the many squiggly red lines pointing out my grammatical mistakes. I felt back then that writing is considered good only if there are no red lines in MS Word. But mamma would say: “Speak out loud. Hear how your writing sounds. The more you speak, the better you’d get.”
I recall a David Perell podcast where a guest explained the flawed logic behind MS Word's grammatical rules: If you paste a Shakespeare quote, there are red lines too. Does this mean Shakespeare wrote with illogical grammar?
Yes… writing, reading, and communication has evolved over the years. We started by writing on stones. Then languages were born. So did culture, which led to nations and empires thriving. Then came technological revolutions across continents. We learned to speak faster, sharper, clearer—and we were also forced to create noise, confusion, and tension from the dawn of the Internet to social media. Amid all this, grammar has adapted, evolved, or dissolved. New words are born and many are lost. This led me to read this: "4 Ways the Internet Has Changed the English Language":
When people are bilingual – especially when they speak the standard variation of a language and then a dialect, creole or a language that is seen as inferior – there have long been concerns that the second language or dialect needs to be suppressed, or they'll never learn the first one properly. Much the same instinct can be seen with the concerns about what the internet is doing to the English language; what if a generation grows up able only to speak lolcat, and not to read Shakespeare?! But a couple of decades of widespread internet access have demonstrated that internet dialects operate much like any other dialect: speakers learn to switch confidently and accurately between the two, borrowing words from one to the other as seems appropriate, to the lexical enhancement of both. The internet has changed the English language considerably; long may it continue.
I often look back at my own experience with grammar: I learned from my mother and by reading fiction. Later, I experimented with my writing style by depending on MS Word. Now I read more online stories, essays, articles, and newsletters. And my writing, my grammar style has changed accordingly. Now in the age of AI, writing continues to be refurbished, sliced or spiced up. So how do we engage with grammar now?
Tracing the Spike in Artificial Writing & Synthetic Grammar
We have advanced descendants of MS Word such as Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Scrivener, or Lex. In my quest to find answers about grammar’s evolution since GenAI, I first wanted to understand "Why Does AI Write… Like That?" This New York Times essay notes:
If we’re going to turn over essentially all communication to the Omniwriter, it matters what kind of a writer it is. Strangely, A.I. doesn’t seem to know. If you ask ChatGPT what its own writing style is like, it’ll come up with some false modesty about how its prose is sleek and precise but somehow hollow: too clean, too efficient, too neutral, too perfect, without any of the subtle imperfections that make human writing interesting. In fact, this is not even remotely true. A.I. writing is marked by a whole complex of frankly bizarre rhetorical features that make it immediately distinctive to anyone who has ever encountered it. It’s not smooth or neutral at all — it’s weird.
…A.I.s have spent the last few years watching and imitating us, scraping the planet for data to digest and disgorge, but humans are mimics as well. A recent study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development analyzed more than 360,000 YouTube videos consisting of extemporaneous talks by flesh-and-blood academics and found that A.I. language is increasingly coming out of human mouths. The more we're exposed to A.I., the more we unconsciously pick up its tics, and it spreads from there. Some of the British parliamentarians who started their speeches with the phrase "I rise to speak" probably hadn't used A.I. at all. They had just noticed that everyone around them was saying it and decided that maybe they ought to do the same. Perhaps that day will come for us, too. Soon, without really knowing why, you will find yourself talking about the smell of fury and the texture of embarrassment. You, too, will be saying "tapestry." You, too, will be saying "delve."
I then dove into "What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?" This section stood out:
…for English departments, and for college writing in general, the arrival of A.I. has been more vexed. Why bother teaching writing now? The future of the midterm essay may be a quaint worry compared with larger questions about the ramifications of artificial intelligence, such as its effect on the environment, or the automation of jobs. And yet has there ever been a time in human history when writing was so important to the average person? E-mails, texts, social-media posts, angry missives in comments sections, customer-service chats—let alone one's actual work. The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of "mass writing." It's possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.
I later read "What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing," and it says: "While AI can speed up the writing process, it doesn't optimize quality — and it endangers our sense of connection to ourselves and others." The author continues:
Broadly, good writing seems to require a balance of conformity and nonconformity, and at times, deliberate rule-breaking. A certain amount of Strunk and White-style convention is necessary to convey ideas coherently — after all, language is a shared system of meaning, and straying too far from its rules risks losing connection with readers or becoming unreadable altogether. But good writers recognize that grammatical rules are dictated by problematic power structures and are not independent measures of correctness. Good writers assess the rhetorical context for their writing and make deliberate decisions about where to conform and where to stray.
Speak Your Mind First. You Can Draft & Edit Later
As I dissected the different wisdoms shared by the authors of the essays that I quoted above, it soon hit me: one way to become better at grammar today is perhaps to speak out loud. This was something mamma taught me several years ago when she held those spoken English classes the old-school way with textbooks and a whiteboard.
We tend to become better speakers when we interact more with others, read more and write down our thoughts in our journals. When we speak with anyone, we don't think of grammar. We just speak because it's instinctive, and natural. It’s like breathing. We don't think about punctuations, adjectives, nouns, or pronouns. Thus, the more we speak, the better we can grasp our thoughts and convey our ideas clearly.
Today, tools like WisprFlow make this easier. Here's how it works for me:
I jot down bullet points of any essays I want to write with pen and paper. [I write by hand because it impacts your mind positively.]
Then I start ‘writing’ using WisprFlow, a voice-to-text diction tool on my laptop.
I proceed to edit all these blurb of words and do basic grammar checks using Google Docs. Since I ‘write’ by speaking, the art of editing the flow of my grammar feels more natural and conversational.
I then feed this into Claude for pattern recognition and here’s what I do different: I use AI tools to ask me set of questions that is focused on expanding my thinking. [The essay by Every.to, 'Think First, AI Second' offers practical insight on the same]. I get bombarded with frameworks such as why I wrote what I wrote, what’s my point here, what’s my contrarian view if any, what’s right, what’s wrong, and other such questions.
I respond to all of them via WisprFlow. This lets me to amplify my writing further because writing is thinking. I think and then I speak. This goes on until I believe I have created a decent first draft. Thus, AI doesn’t write for me but it simply helps me spot different ways I can think about my own writing.
These day whenever I sit down and 'speak' my writing, I imagine mamma sitting next to me with her grammar book, telling me the red lines are okay—that the more I speak, the more my thinking expands, and the better my writing becomes. And maybe, maybe in time, my grammar might fall into place.
And that’s all for today!
Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.
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