Attack of the Grammar Police

For one of our (almost) final assignments in one of my classes we had to do a blind peer review on a classmate's paper. Then the professor looked them over and sent the review to the author to use or not (at our discretion) before turning in our final paper.

Now, I'll admit to not fretting about sentence structure here on the ol' blog. Honestly, most of my posts are typed haphazardly on breaks while at work. And since I don't think I'm getting graded on my posts I tend not to worry about that at all. (Though perhaps I am and that's why the commenting has been so scarce, of late. On the other hand, I actually think that has more to do with me being incredibly boring of late.) Regardless, I figure if there's essentially reasonable grammar, spelling, and punctuation then I'm set. For a blog entry. For my school papers I'm much more, what's the word? Oh yes, obsessive.

So looking over my peer review last night I was annoyed. Because the only thing the reviewer mentioned was that "the author is prone to run on sentences". S/he then proceeded to give three examples. None of which were run on sentences. They were long, yes. They were complex. Again, yes. But they weren't, according to grammatical rules, run on. I'll freely admit that I do tend towards long, complex sentences. (Probably here on the blog as well.) I've always been annoyed with little staccato sentences that couldn't join thoughts together if their lives depended on it. Sure, there's a time and a place for rapid-fire short sentences. Mostly I think that place is dialog within fiction. I don't really feel it has much of a place in an academic paper. Not that academic papers have to have ginormous sentences that ramble all over the place and leave you scratching your head trying to figure out what was just said. I'm not a subscriber to the "show my elitism by writing above your head" school of thought. But I do think that as a PhD student (and hopefully one day graduate) that it's totally allowable for the sentences to be something more than "See Dick run. Run Dick, run."

And this leaves me wondering if, having seen the peer review, the professor is going to mark me down because of my long-but-gramatically-correct sentences on the opinion of my reviewer that they're run on. I have no idea. I suppose I should look them over and try to break them into more digestible pieces so the average person can read them more easily. The problem with this, of course, is that I don't know that I'm going to be able to identify the ones that really have a problem and need to be broken down. I don't want to chop everything up so that it reads like a 6th grade essay.

I guess my other frustration with the review is that it really only had the comment about my sentence structure. There wasn't any "this paper is more boring than watching grass grow" or maybe something positive (cause I kinda thought the subject was interesting). There was no evaluation (constructive or otherwise). There was simply a comment about our differenc in opinion about sentence structure. So I don't know if it's a good paper that is written by someone who likes complex sentences or if it's a cruddy one on top of the sentence complexity issue. And this summarizes why I dislike peer reviews. At the end of the day, I don't feel like my reviewer took the assignment seriously. And while this may, in fact, be representative of the peer review process applied by professional journals (I suspect that it is) it's irritating.

So I leave you with this question: what would you do? Break up all the sentences? Break up some of them? (If you choose that one, tell me how you'd decide, keeping in mind that I don't have run on sentences as defined by the rule of grammar.) Or some other as yet unmentioned solution?