One for the home team

In her chapter on "Sentences," Ms. Prose imparts some wisdom, and a charming analogy:

What's strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature. ... Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought.

A novelist friend compares the rules of grammar, puntuation, and usage to a sort of old-fashioned etiquette. He says that writing is a bit like having someone to your house. The writer is the host, the reader the guest, and you, the writer, follow the etiquette because you want your reader to be more comfortable, especially if you're planning to serve them something they might not be expecting.

I couldn't have put it better. It's an odd feeling, reading a book and having the sense that something is off -- realizing, as you're trotting along, that at some point a few words back, you must have taken a wrong turn, because all of a sudden you've arrived in a place that seems foreign, disjointed. And you have to go back, retrace your steps, try to figure out where the sentence led you astray, where some rapscallion of a comma showed up in the wrong place or flashed the wrong warning signal. A lot of people, when reading, can recognize when something is amiss but don't always have the tools to explain what, precisely, that is. The authorities who set the rules don't make it very easy for us, either, throwing out all these enigmatic terms like "apposition" and "participial" and "restrictive" and "subjunctive mood." (How is it helpful when you're looking for an explanation to something, but in order to understand the explanation, you have to go to the dictionary for translation?)

So I feel the writerly people's pain. It's tough to get it down. And yet, in the long run, trying to figure it all out can only help.