I don’t know how you decide the correct usage of grammar in whatever you write, but I just write out whatever I’m thinking and then read it over to see if it feels right.
Technically since I read a lot of work that uses the correct form of grammar (I assume they get people that know the rules to check it out) I can notice when something is out of place.
This means I have to keep switching words around until I am comfortable with the sentence. Using no science involved whatsoever. This is irritating at times, but learning grammar laws sounds even more irritating. I wonder how long I can keep this up. It would be really nice to be extremely grammar efficient.
The only people that really get upset by minor technical grammar rules are people that know their grammar rules. These people upset me because I get the feeling they think they are better than me.
I’m not too great with grammer either and tend to write inverted sentences. Such as: “When going down town, I always drive my pickup truck instead of the sedan.” This instead of : “I always drive my pickup truck instead of the sedan when going down town.”
When I read my stuff over I keep repeating, Subject, verb, object for the simple, standard word order in English. That word order tends to result in rather dull writing but it is easy to read. Sort of the “Run, Spot, run.” school of writing.
There’s nothing even remotely ungrammatical about your sentence. The litmus test of good grammar is whether the reader (or the listener) accurately understands what you’re trying to say. Grammatical rules have evolved in order to facilitate communication, not to stifle creativity.
Where I went to college the class that English-Teaching majors failed most frequently was grammar. I saw that in my own grammar class as well, and all of the students in the class could write very well, so it was surprising they did so poorly in the class. I theorized then that we internalize grammar so much from reading and writing that our sense of grammar becomes innate, which is great for writing, but makes it hard to demonstrate knowledge of the rules if you don’t know why you know them.
I know it’s correct, but a whole paragraph of inverted sentences is just as boring as repetitive subject, verb, object forms and can be harder to read.
I think you’ve got the best handle on how to speak English gooder. Er, more goodly. Something like that. You know what I mean. Seriously, though, don’t worry about not knowing “the rules” of grammar. Grammar doesn’t tell you what to do, it explains what you’re already doing.
In middle school, I was horrible at English classes. 'Cause it was all this crap about subject-verb agreement, and conjugations, and diagramming sentences. I sucked at that. I was barely a C- student. Then I got to Jr. High, and it was all about actual writing, and suddenly I was the star pupil. I still didn’t know a participle from a pineapple, but I knew instinctively what sounded right, and what sounded wrong, and I didn’t need to explain why. That made all the difference in the world.
Grammar rules are just a codification of what you already know. Very few native English speakers use bad grammar (other than the occasional mistake), but plenty of people can’t explain what the rules are.
For instance, I have a copy of Quirk and Greenbaum’s excellent “A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English.” It’s filled with sentences like “A few conjuncts, *eg: so, yet * resemble coordinators both in being connectives and in having certain syntactic features. In particular, unlike clauses introduced by subordinators, those introduced by conjuncts cannot be moved in front of the preceeding clause.”
No one is expected to be able to remember that. However, I’m sure you’d recognize the following as wrong:
*Yet he made a lot of money. He was born poor.
You aren’t expected to be able to articulate the rule that makes this wrong; you just need to recognize the fact and not make the mistake.
On thing that I noticed growing up in Iowa was misuse of the simple past tense (preterit) and the more complicated pasts like the past perfect. Such things as, “I seen him yesterday.” or, “I wish I had of saw him.” were the norm. Many older people, men especially, never went beyond the 8th grade. My father and two of my three uncles were examples. However, my father learned a trade and the others were farmers and got along just fine with the grammar they had. As has been noted, the object is to be understood and in their circle and at their time they managed to do that.