Proper Grammar Can Help You Drive

As someone who grew up on books and learned to write at an early age, literature was always my go-to form of entertainment. In third grade, I got in trouble for reading during class (ironically, it was during English class). In fourth grade, I read all fifteen required books for Battle of the Books in a single month. In ninth grade, I got into a magnet school for writing, which I attend during my fourth block to this day. To summarize: language is my life.

Of course, that means I’m a massive grammar nerd.

Everyone around me knows that they shouldn’t let me edit their writing unless they want it torn apart without mercy. I edited a friend’s college essay recently, and I ended up commenting on his 500-word essay 32 times. (In my defense, he was applying for an Ivy League!)

Now, I’m not a total snob: I’m not opposed to breaking the odd grammatical rule for the sake of art and connotation (I will be doing so in this essay), but I am always very aware of it. Painfully so. It haunts me.

In fact, grammar has become so deeply ingrained into my soul that I, like a lot of people, can look at a sentence and know that something’s off before I even catch the error. It’s an odd superpower, but most of us can do it. A grammatical error stands out to us like a sore thumb.

But it wasn’t always this way. We all had to learn grammar at some point. There was a point in my life when I was still learning the difference between “affect” and “effect.” There was a point in my life during which I didn’t know whether punctuation went outside or inside the parentheses. And there was—horror of horrors—a time when I didn’t know the difference between “their,” “they’re,” and “there.”

Driving, I have found, is largely the same way. It starts off as rote memorization of rules: who has right-of-way, which side of the road to drive in, which lane to take, and which sign means what. But, after a while, it becomes a skill. It becomes something one doesn’t know how to do so much as one just does.

But it wasn’t always this way. Every good driver was once a beginner, and every skill starts as rote memorization. Before I innately knew the difference between “to” and “too,” I had to sit and memorize which word to use in which situations. I had to have a grammar education before I could go off and do it on my own, lest I make a mistake.

Driver education is arguably the most important component to becoming a safe driver—after all, driving mistakes have the potential to be so much worse than grammar mistakes. Skills come through experience, yes, but first they come through knowing and learning the rules in a safe environment. A driving education provides that safe environment so that new drivers can let the information sink in and become innate before being set loose on the roads.

I learned everything in my behind-the-wheel driving course—and I mean everything. During my final driving exam, I was rear-ended by a silver Toyota while at a stoplight, which was the very definition of bad luck. Did I want to learn how to give a statement to the police after an accident and trade insurance information? Of course not, but I was thankful that it happened when an experienced teacher was with me.

I’ve known people who have died in crashes. The sad part is: that’s not uncommon. Most people know at least one person who has died in a vehicle accident. In addition to losing a couple of family members to car accidents, I reside in a school district in which three students recently died in an accident. Driving safety was promoted in my area even more after the accident, and a few of my friends have stopped driving altogether because of it. A couple have decided to hold off on getting a license in the first place.

Regardless, driving has the potential to be a relatively safe activity when the person behind the wheel is attentive, alert, and educated. Practice makes perfect, and practice in a safe environment with an experienced driver actively giving tips and ready to step in is even better—just like practice makes perfect in terms of grammar.

As I learned in my behind-the-wheel class, there are a lot of factors that contribute to safe driving. As I learned in my grammar class, innate knowledge comes from a purposeful education. And, as the days go by, I am continuing to learn how to drive even more carefully. The knowledge is becoming even more innate. I see roads and know exactly what to do, just as I see grammar mistakes and know exactly what is wrong.

As the knowledge becomes more innate and I become more practiced, I am in less danger of being in an accident. I gain confidence—but, just as I continue to edit my writing and check it for typos, I will continue to be as attentive as possible when driving.

After all, reckless grammar can be corrected with a simple backspace button or autocorrect, but reckless driving is irreversible.