No, it ain't. Isn't, to be careful. What does your use of the language say to your editor? Skilled? Careful? Dull? Careless? Unconcerned? It's trite to say, but you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
        It's not my intention to teach grammar here. There are books for that -- every Junior High has them --ask your kid sister (or her daughter) to let you borrow one. Look inside. There are whole pages on "there/their" and "was/been" and "see/saw/seen." You know all that.
        I know a really well-educated chap, a profes-sor at a small college, who still says "I seen a robin today." No one corrects him. Some "know" he knows better, some accept it as his eccentricity.
        When you get to be a full tenured professor, you can say "I seen" too, but if you are a writer on the up-slope to fame, the editor is your employer. Many a chap has told me he went into writing to "be my own boss." Well, if the editor isn't boss, you won't long be an employee. Might as well get used to it.
        Just as you wouldn't go to your job as teller in a bank in cut-offs and a torn Metallica shirt, you shouldn't send your art off to work in lounging clothes. If the editor wants someone to paint her garage, funky duds are okay. But to go out front and entertain her customers, no.
        Heard it all before? I can only think of one writer who hasn't, and he's been sealed in an old antifreeze can since birth. Why, then, do we see what we see when we slit open the fat envelopes? Why do we get grammar and construction that's so bad it's embarrassing, like watching a woman drunk in a public place?
        Writing is easy. Anyone with use of a body part that moves can do it. One of the best poets I knew could only move one hand, up-bang! and down-bang! We set him up with a masochistic computer and Ray was published. Writing, putting symbols into a form to be read by others, requires no special effort. Let's all be writers, then!
        There are millions of folks who would never perform on the piano in public because they aren't accomplished enough. ("I won't make a fool of myself that way!") Why do those same folks per-form on the typewriter or processor and submit

their output to the public? That's what a writer does; he performs for the public if the editor per-mits it. Folks who never got beyond "Chopsticks" send tons of expensive paper, soiled by the sym-bols of carelessness, to strangers with the desire to have many other strangers see it.
        You see a flaw in the analogy? Playing the piano is merely repeating what has already been created, while a writer must be "creative" and need not, therefore, be constrained by the rules. Very well, suppose I slacken the strings in a piano and play it with mittens. I can say that this is "creative," that I am doing art. Then listen to a jazz pianist improvising. Despite his unconventional, continuously created new "art," he still uses a well-tuned instrument and observes the centuries-old rules of composition or the result is cacophony.
        I am not totally literate. I have a list of
"trouble words" that I search for in every manuscript, words that, like "saw" and "seen" for the professor, I am apt to get wrong, words that the "speller" will ignore. For non-fiction I tried a grammar checker, but I'm still not happy with it. Alas, the only way I can get it right is to look for my "danger signs." Like the seven cancer warning signs, there are places to look that are most likely to show trouble.
        Find yours. Any other person, taken at ran-dom, can find errors you miss because you are "blind" to them. Select a few persons at random and have them go over your prose. Strangers are better than friends or relatives. Peer groups often share regional or cultural errors and do not notice the familiar goofs of their friends.
        Make a list. Check. Care. Editors, like many other primates, have "good" and "bad" days. If you irritate one by poking bad things into his cage, he'll remember. If you poke on her "worst" day, she'll remember actively, and I don't really have to explain that.
        If you don't care about acceptance, if you really aren't concerned whether the world ever sees your art, then at least you can respect the editor. On a "good" day, after her Alpo and a sun-bath, she might be a really nice person. Don't tease!