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Those of you who know about our little issue with the serial comma (or as we like to call it Our Favorite Thing in The World), avert your eyes. We are going to say something shocking. Of course, if you’re reading this, you have a synopsis to finish. It is past 5 p.m., and we haven’t seen it come our way. Self-sabotage is all very good, but we said we wouldn’t leave our computer until we heard from you.

Grammar and structure are really important. Really, really important. They make reading easy and fun. Perhaps we would we have screamed less and enjoyed more if Cormac McCarthy hadn’t been so darned precious in writing Suttree. We couldn’t relax into the rhythm of the story because we had to continually and work through the, uh, unique style. Careful attention to the rules would have helped.

But tools like grammar and such are not writing. Writing is this thing you do from your creative center. If we stopped to worry about rules, we’d never post anything here. Heck, we’d never send an email. Oh sure, probably we should focus a little more (or at least pretend to proofread), but we must agree that forcing rules on creative writing sort of takes the creative part out of the equation:

…If we want children to write well, giving them formal instruction in grammar turns out not to be any use; getting them actually writing seems to help a great deal more. [Emphasis ours] Teaching techniques that do work well, the study discovered, are those that include combining short sentences into longer ones, and embedding elements into simple sentences to make them more complex: in other words, using the language to say something.

A word often flourished in this context by the common sense brigade is “basics”. It’s always seemed curious to me that commentators and journalists – people who write every day and who presumably know something about the practice of putting words on paper – should make such an elementary error as to think that spelling and punctuation and other such surface elements of language are “the basics”. These, and deeper features of language such as grammar, are things you can correct at proof stage, at the very last minute, and we all do that very thing, every day. But how can something you can alter or correct at that late point possibly be basic? What’s truly basic is something that has to be in place much earlier on: an attitude to the language, to work, to the world itself.

You don’t have to forego education in grammar in favor of letting the creative juices do whatever it is they do (and sometimes, we just don’t want to know). But focusing on what’s wrong can destroy the joy in a child who sat down and told the greatest story ever.

• Common sense has much to learn from moonshine – It’s time English teachers got back to basics – less grammar, more play