Rules Are Made to be Broken

Grammar – everyone’s gotta do it. How important is grammar and what resources do you use to make sure you’re on top of it. And when do you break grammar rules?

by Paul D. Marks

Grammar is important, obviously. Look at some books and how poorly they’re written. The whole point of grammar is to be able to write sentences that others will understand. That said, sometimes we can break the rules and people will still get the point we’re trying to make. After all, we’re not writing term papers, we’re writing fiction. And we’re not writing fiction in the 19th century, so we write more casually, break more rules. That said, we still need to be able to communicate.

I have a friend who wants to be a writer more than anything in the world. And she constantly shows me her work. But it’s so hard to get through it, partly because of grammar issues, that I end up giving up and not finishing it. You have to have more than a desire to write. Writing is both a craft and an art and you have to get the craft down. And part of the craft is knowing grammar.

Grammar provides the backbone or the foundation for your writing. You have to know it before you can start breaking the rules. And if you break the rules, you have to know what rules you’re breaking and why, for what effect.

You can, indeed, break the rules to create a certain “voice” or style of writing. Or in dialogue to have people talk like real people. I often break the rules of pacing, style, cadence and repetition for emphasis, to create that voice. To that end, I often write in sentence fragments. But I have to go back over everything to make sure I’m not overdoing it or doing it to the point of distraction. One of my favorite writers is James Ellroy, probably most famous for his LA Quartet which includes the book LA Confidential, that many of us know from the movie if not the book itself. As the LA Quartet series of books progressed, Ellroy’s style become more abbreviated. More staccato. At first I liked it. But by the time of White Jazz, the last book in the series, it had gotten to be a little much. And in some books that came after the series it was unbearable, at least for me. So I skipped a couple of his books. Though with his latest, Perfidia, he seems back on track. My point is, you can have too much of a good thing.

The main thing is that you want to have clarity of thought. You want people to be able to understand what you’re saying. To get it. You also want your story to read smoothly, even if it’s written in a staccato style. It shouldn’t be so overwhelming that people stumble through it.

One place where grammar rules don’t necessarily apply is in dialogue, because people don’t necessarily talk in complete, grammatically correct sentences. But dialogue is one of the places where I think people mess up. I see some very well-known writers whose characters often don’t use contractions. But most people do. And when I come across that kind of dialogue it just sounds so formal and takes me out of the story. It makes the characters sound stiff and as if they’re not native English speakers. And this always throws me out of the moment.

So sometimes it’s better to be more nimble than correct. Better not to miss the forest for the trees. In this case the trees are correct grammar but they block our view of the forest as a whole. And maybe it’s best to remember what Mark Twain said about this: “Great books are weighted and measured by their style and matter, and not the trimmings and shadings of their grammar.”

But then there’s Dan Brown, whose writing is atrocious and whose sales are through the roof. So who knows? Throw caution to the wind and the Chicago Manual in the fire.

So, what do I use to make sure I’m on top of it: These days my go-to source is the internet. Various sources of grammar can be found there in abundance. But I still have hard copies of Strunk and White, the Chicago Manual of Style and others. And I do go to them on occasion. There’s also classics like The Transitive Vampire, Eats, Shoots & Leaves and so many others, too many to name.

What are your thoughts and recommendations on this?

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And now for the usual BSP:

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RULES: Follow 'em, break 'em...or make 'em? by Cathy Ace

How important is grammar and when do you break grammar rules?

Oh my goodness me, grammar. Thanks to the Welsh education system, I took years and years of English Language classes, as well as English Literature classes. 

I loved literature classes; we’d read books, plays and poetry – at home, then, often, again aloud in the classroom – then discuss and critique the works. These were the classes where I fell in love with the words of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Jane Austen, among others. They allowed me to indulge my joy of reading, and were something I looked forward to every week. It's also worth noting that those writers changed the expected structure, language, grammar, and punctuation of their time to suit their purposes...maybe I was drawn to rule-breakers (and rule-makers) from an early age!

In language classes we plodded through rules. I hate rules. Probably the best lesson of all was the one where our teacher wrote “GHOTI” on the blackboard (yes, I’m that old!) and explained to us how it should be pronounced the same way as “FISH”. (FYI: “GH” as in “cough”; “O” as in “women”; “TI” as in “motion”.) It’s an old ‘un, but a good ‘un…and – to us – it was as fresh as the proverbial daisy, at the time. 

I was being taught at a time when it was no longer fashionable to teach “parts of the language” so the complexities of the language were, never, therefore, defined or named for me in my English Language classes. That joy came in Latin classes, where the poor teacher had to teach us basic grammatical terminology as it pertained to English before we could understand its applications in Latin. I should mention I failed my Latin O level exam (the exam you take at 16 years of age in Wales), and pretty miserably at that. I suspect “amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant” was only ever going to get me so far!

Thus, I have to admit I don’t know the correct terminology, let alone the rules, for most parts of the language, and also realize the punctuation I learned back in the 1960s is now somewhat dated. How do I cope? I write and punctuate from the heart, and consider the comments made about those aspects of my writing by my editor/s…then decide if it’s worth arguing the toss, or not. When I read, poor grammar and punctuation can burst my bubble of immersion in the book…the only rule I follow, therefore, is – “Does this work for me/my character?” rather than “Is this grammatically perfect?” I don’t want my grammar or punctuation to break the spell – so I hope my readers can cope with that, and enjoy the story.

Cathy Ace is the Bony Blithe Award-winning author of The Cait Morgan Mysteries and The WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries.  You can find out more about Cathy, her work and her characters at her website, where you can also sign up for her newsletter with news, updates and special offers: http://cathyace.com/