As a member of the American Christian Fiction Writer's group, I am privileged to listen and learn the business side of being published, from many who have already crossed that threshold. There was a post the other day, about how Christian writing should always have proper grammar, even when writing dialogue. While it is true, no matter whether we are Christian writers, or secular, our grammar should be proper, I had to wonder about stretching that to our writing dialogue. People, for the most part, do not speak with proper grammar. We use slang, catch phrases, and partial words to get across what we want to communicate. My feeling is that writing dialogue applying all the proper grammar rules, would make our work seem uppity and unrealistic. In a way, we would be bastardizing the conversation, much in the same way in which we would be trying to fix the bastardization of English grammar. Mother always said that two wrongs never made a right. My concern for correcting normal speech comes from working in journalism. I took great care to make sure that people were being quoted directly. I learned how changing one word in a quote could change the entire context with which it was said. A person who did not understand that retyped my writing into the paper’s computer, and it was often changed. Not only was my sentence structure changed, my grammar destroyed, but also, direct quotes were edited. It got to the point where I had to send a copy of what I had submitted to the people I was writing the story about, so they could see that I had respected them, and written a proper piece of journalism. This lack of professionalism and respect for responsible journalism finally caused me to quit the paper. This decision hurt a great deal, but there are times, we just have to stand up for what we believe to be right. The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back came when a teacher in our high school found out about his parents committing suicide, by seeing their address posted in the paper. The police had not yet been able to contact the entire family. One of the paper's writers wrote that he could not name names, but the address was... Being appalled, that was the last week I wrote for that paper. Up to that point, my readers respected my writing, constantly told me how they enjoyed my articles, and column. Those same readers were very understanding when I quit over the suicide story. It is because of their encouragement that I continue to write. It is because of their encouragement that I went back to school, at the ripe old age of 50, and worked to earn my Honours Certificate in English Creative Writing. As you can see, I still haven't gotten over being paid by the inch as a journalist. Love in Christ, Jude