Joy and command of the gerund are the secrets to good writing

Among recent posts on my Facebook home page was an illustration from the 15th-century book of hours of Marguerite d’orléans. A central image is surrounded by a gilt margin, garlanded with flowers and scattered with random letters. Among the flowers, a quartet of little figures labours with brooms and baskets to sweep up the wayward alphabet.

It is a telling visual metaphor for the business of writing, and a reminder that Making Your Mark, the British Library’s exhibition on the history of writing over the past 5,000 years, opens later this month. Charting the evolution of writing from hieroglyphs to emojis, the exhibition also considers the future of the written word.

Meanwhile, in primary schools this summer,

10- and 11-year-olds will take spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) tests, showing their skill at wrangling modal verbs and frontal adverbials.

If you haven’t a clue what these might be, you are in good company: Sir Michael Morpurgo observed that his ignorance of them meant that he obviously shouldn’t be a writer.

Here, I think wistfully of Ronald Searle’s unforgettable drawing of a gerund attacking some peaceful pronouns. If there must be frontal adverbials and modal verbs in primary schools, could they not be fun?

Apparently not. According to Graham Frost, a primary school head from Cumbria, the Spag tests discourage creativity, placing more value on technical ability than writing skill.

Technique is an essential element of mastery: I work with university students whose school education neglected to teach them basic grammar, cruelly hampering their writing skills. We often discuss apostrophes, but we have

never been alarmed by a frontal adverbial, and I don’t see why it should terrorise 10-year-olds, either.

There is a reason why Marguerite d’orléans’s letter-gleaners work among merry garlands of flowers: if writing is to survive for another 5,000 years, it must involve joy as well as gerunds.

“Every time there’s been a royal [occasion]… a terrible low rumble has begun in newsrooms across the country, that has soon led to people ringing up to ask whether I’m ‘thinking of doing something’.” Thus Sir Andrew Motion, one of a long line of Poets Laureate who seemed to find the job more of a burden than an honour.

The incumbent, Carol Ann Duffy, steps down in May and the search for her successor has begun with the traditional chorus of bards declining to take part in what Wendy Cope described as “a competition that many poets have no interest in winning”. How different from the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, the last election for which involved scenes of treachery and blackguarding undreamed of in Westeros.

Could anyone reconcile these two great British poetic roles: the grand but uninspiring Laureateship, and the viciously competitive Professorship? The current Oxford Professor, Simon Armitage, whose tenure is soon to expire, has some thoughts: the laureate must not be “a shop steward for contemporary values… If you put the laurel crown on your head and you haven’t read the whole of Beowulf or the Iliad… then you are not worthy of the role.” Whoever can he have in mind?