I’m back with even more writing rules to break after introducing you to some of my least-favorite and most-breakable rules in Writing Rules to Break at Will and More Writing Rules to Break.
I absolutely love ignoring an unjust rule. I agree with the sentiment “rules are made to be broken” a good bit of the time; when there’s a sensible reason for a rule then I’m all in favor of following it. When there’s no good reason for a rule and there’s just rules for the sake of having rules then I endorse breaking those dumb and unreasonable rules whenever possible.
Grammar rules exist to make sure we, speakers of a common language, can understand one another. To understand another speaker you need a lexicon and a grammar in common. That is, you have to know the same words and you have to both use the same rules for the order you put those words in. That’s how two people understand each other through spoken or written communication.
It’s important to obey rules of grammar insofar as you need to do so to make sure other speakers of your same language—and the same variant of your language that you use—can understand you. In theory, both parties know and adhere to all the same grammar rules so the words used by one can be received by the other without any confusion. The more one party deviates from those grammar rules and the other party does not, the more chance of miscommunication. If one party begins deviating from grammar rules they will hit a threshold where the second party might think, “They’re making a lot of grammatical mistakes.” And, later, they may cross a second threshold where the second party can no longer parse the first party’s sentences to understand what they mean.
Ideally, as a writer, you want to cross neither of those thresholds. You want your readers to understand your meaning and you also don’t want to distract the reader from your story by causing them to notice what they think are “grammar mistakes.”
With all that said, consider that the lexicon and the grammar of a living language change all the time. All the major dictionaries publish updates all the time as words are added to our language. Merriam-Webster added 370 new words to their record of our language about six months ago. It is reasonable to think that the grammatical rules of our language would, likewise, be updated periodically to reflect the way speakers use the language. However, there’s no “source of truth” for grammar the way there is for the lexicon; there’s no free, publicly available, single source for English grammar rules that is maintained and updated on an as-needed basis.
Instead we’re plying our twenty-first-century vocabulary with a sixteenth-century grammar and that doesn’t necessarily make sense. The way people use language changes all the time, and not only with the introduction of new words.
All of the above also assumes you’re using exactly the same variant of a language—for instance, English—as the other party to your words. I sometimes think of Eavan Boland’s poem, “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951,” where she describes being chastised by a teacher for using “am’nt” (a contraction of “am not” similar to “ain’t” in American English), as “am’nt” isn’t “proper English” in England (although it was “proper English” in Ireland). The “correct grammar” of American English, British English, Irish English, Guyanese English, African American Vernacular English, Jamaican English, Australian English, Cajun Vernacular English—are all different. There are many correct grammars for this one language.
The important grammar rules are the ones that you and your reader both understand, not the ones that are held over from the development of the language. Sometimes those will be the same and sometimes they won’t. I don’t believe there’s a good reason to have different rules of grammar for (or a different standard of applying the rules of grammar to) speech and writing. It’s mostly fine to write the same as you speak; if people understand you easily when you speak, they’ll understand you in writing—even if you break any of the following.
Don’t End Sentences With Prepositions
A preposition just isn’t something you end a sentence with. Oh no, look, I just did the thing and the world didn’t end. Everyone understood what I meant. No one was confused.
People end sentences with prepositions in speech all the time. Avoiding ending a sentence with a preposition isn’t even a universal grammar rule—just a rule for formal writing. As a rule (which, again, made to be broken), formal writing means writing for professional an academic settings. When the school phase of one’s life is behind them (if it ever is), that probably means when you are writing business communication or you’re writing a scientific or scholarly paper for publication in a journal or you’re writing a textbook or something like that.
Business communication is iffy, honestly. Maybe I get extra leeway with this because I’m an editor. Maybe when I use informal grammar in my business communication, the other party reads it and thinks, “That seems wrong but she’s an editor so she must be right and I must be wrong.” Or maybe the other party is judging me quietly. But I don’t hold tight to the rules of formal communication in all my business writing. If I’m writing an RFP or awarding a contract, yes, I will probably bust out the perfect grammar. But even when I am writing to someone I don’t know in a business context, I don’t feel like the formal tone is necessary.
With business communication at one’s discretion, that leaves scholarly/academic writing, which, sure, use the ancient rules of our language for this purpose I guess. As a person who publishes scientific journals for a living I don’t mind telling you that we are not at all concerned with whether there are prepositions at the end of sentences as we are mainly concerned with the science being correct (and conveyed in a way that all readers can understand without confusion).
If you’re writing anything else you can put this rule out of mind, especially if moving a preposition to another part of your sentence would create a really awkward sentence that nobody would ever say in real life.
In writing, if you have a choice between a technically correct sentence that no one would ever say and a technically incorrect sentence that sounds like the way real people speak, you should probably choose the latter.
Comma Splicing
What even are the rules for using commas? Nobody actually knows. I believe that if you took any ten editors and put is in a room to share our knowledge of how to use commas we’d have about 80 percent of our knowledge held in common and the other 20 percent would be completely different from editor to editor. This is the kind of thing non-editors will want to burn me at the stake for saying but there’s wrong comma usage and then there’s “wrong comma usage” and nobody actually cares about the second one.
Actual wrong comma usage means your sentence reads like William Shatner reciting poetry, sticking weird pauses in places they don’t belong.
These comma, rules are making me, crazy.
That right there does not sound right in anyone’s mind’s ear. Anyone who reads English, looking at that, will know those commas are misplaced. That’s an example of actually wrong comma usage.
A comma splice is when two independent clauses are joined by a comma when they should instead be joined by a colon, semicolon, or conjunction like “and.” So if someone notices you’ve committed a comma splice you can quickly save face by drawing a little dot over the comma and then saying, “What? No I didn’t. That’s a semicolon. Look again.”
But anyway a comma splice might be something like this:
We walked to school, we didn’t have money for the bus.
That’s a comma splice. “We walked to school” and “We didn’t have money for the bus” are both independent clauses and they’re linked with a comma (incorrect) instead of literally any other way.
We walked to school, because we didn’t have money for the bus.
We walked to school; we didn’t have money for the bus.
We walked to school. We didn’t have money for the bus.
Any of those would communicate the same thing without a comma splice.
Here comes the however: However.
Anyone who reads “we walked to school, we didn’t have money for the bus” will take the intended meaning from that sentence. I don’t think anyone could be confused about the meaning because there’s a comma in the middle instead of a period, semicolon, or conjunction. Perhaps it doesn’t read as smoothly as the other versions do and perhaps that is what the writer intends.
I think gently misusing the formal rules of traditional grammar can create sentences that more closely mirror the way people speak. If I, sitting here in my home office typing away, recollects for you a day when I walked to school, or maybe many days when I walked to school—like an era in which I walked to school—I might say:
We walked to school. We didn’t have money for the bus.
If I were writing a scene where an adult is questioning school children about why they arrived to class late and drenched from the rain, I might write a response like:
We walked to school, we didn’t have money for the bus.
And that would be a perfectly reasonable and correct sentence in that context, because it mirrors natural human utterance. Which is what writing is for.
I guess what I am getting at is, nobody really understands all the rules for commas—or at least no two people can agree on all the formal rules for commas—but pretty much every grammarian can agree a comma splice is “wrong comma usage” (ominous quotation marks). There are times when you can use a comma splice and be “wrong” but not wrong.
Maybe I will write the next one of these about scare quotes.
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