Writing Rules to Break At Will
When to Twist Them, When to Snap Them, and When to Obliterate Them Utterly
"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.”
—Unknown
Obedience and disobedience are a little weird. You have to know a rule in order to obey it. If you just happen to follow a rule by accident without knowing the rule, the action you’re taking is not obedience but something else. Conversely, you don’t have to know a rule to disobey it. If you break a law that you were unaware of, you’re still liable to be punished for breaking that law. Ignorantia juris non excusat. You have to know a rule to follow it, but you don’t have to know a rule to break it. I think that’s weird.
When I was in art school and dinosaurs roamed the planet, my photography teacher—Mr Fear—used to get on my case all the time for doing things that I felt were artistic. The school was fairly Formalist, focusing on teaching and adhering to basic principles of art and design—line, color, shape, etc—as well as composition and process. Illustration was completely forbidden. You could not let these teachers catch you drawing a comic. If I deliberately overexposed or multi-exposed a photo, tuned up the contrast beyond what was considered “ideal,” or attempted anything unusual with perspective or composition, Mr Fear would say: “You have to learn the rules first before you can break the rules.”
I gave up after three years and spent the final year figure modeling for painting classes, scraping just enough credits to graduate and leave the fine arts behind me forever. On a related note: “Don Fear” is one of those ungooglable names. All you turn up is Blue Öyster Cult lyrics. I wonder if he is still out there somewhere, hand-coloring photographs of exotic fish.
All this to say, he was right and he was wrong. You don’t have to know a rule to break it. You can break a rule that you know about on purpose (disobedience), or you can break a rule that you know about by accident (mistake), or you can break a rule you don’t know about (ignorance). You do have to know a rule to know when to break it. You have to know a rule to break it with style.
I’m not sure whether you have to study formal composition and master it before you can make a decision to compose a piece of art in a contrary way. Most people have an internal sense of what is aesthetically pleasing, colored or informed by things we have seen in the past, even if we can’t say specifically what it is we like about a certain painting or sculpture. Likewise, if you know a language well, then you probably have an internal sense of when the language is wrong. Not when something is spelled wrong, necessarily, but when something is phrased incorrectly.
For instance, English has a fairly rigid hierarchy of adjectives that most native speakers never think about. If you were hiking and you encountered a bear, you would never describe the experience thus,
“I saw a white, angry, big bear.”
You would instead say,
“I saw a big, angry, white bear.”
At least, that is what you would say if you survived to tell the tale, which you would not because the bear in this case was a polar bear. If you absolutely must encounter a bear, Shelf Life recommends panda. Anyway, if English is the language you learned from the cradle, nobody taught you that hierarchy in school. You just picked it up from listening to other people speak. If someone gets the hierarchy wrong, you will notice right away whether you understand why it sounded wrong or not.
If in English we would always say Catherine is wearing “a beautiful red dress” (why thank you) and never “a red beautiful dress,” would there ever be a time when it’s okay to write it the latter way? In writing there’s a situation in which every rule can safely be broken.
English is a healthy, living language. That means it’s getting new loanwords all the time from other languages, new words are being invented for new things, old rules are being discarded, word meanings are changing. As an editor, I don’t like that. I hate that the dictionary now says nonplussed can be used to mean “unimpressed or unsurprised,” the opposite of its original meaning—to be perplexed or taken aback. This is the worst. But it’s how language works. If everybody is using the word that way, and they all understand it to mean “unimpressed,” then that’s what it means now. I’m an editor, I just enforce the language rules. I don’t decide what they are. All users of a language, together as a population, do that.
To Recklessly Split the Infinitive
Honestly, are they even still teaching this in schools? I hope not. This is one of those formal rules that gets drilled into everybody as a young person for no reason. The infinitive version of a verb—for instance, “to go”—is never supposed to have an adverb (or anything else) inserted in the middle—for example, “boldly.” In Latin and Old English, infinitives were single words with no spaces. The verb to go in Old English was gān. You can’t stick something in the middle. There’s no space. That’s the whole reason we have this rule. Anyone who tells you that you shouldn’t split infinitives is being pedantic. Tell them where they can boldly go.
“Ain’t” Ain’t in the Dictionary
My second-grade teacher loved to say this, but if you take the time to look you will see that ain’t is, in fact, in the dictionary. You’re not supposed to use contractions in formal writing—meaning, if you’re writing a scholarly or academic paper. Since most of what you’re doing in school and college is writing academic papers, you might have heard this rule stated by a teacher like it’s universal—don’t use contractions in your writing. That’s terrible advice.
People use contractions in speech and you would never want to omit them entirely from dialogue unless it’s your intention that a character speak in a very formal and stilted way. In the Longmire novels by Craig Johnson, Henry Standing Bear consistently speaks without contractions. Why does he speak differently from everyone else? Never explained.
Contractions are a must in dialogue unless you want all of your characters to sound like robots, and they’re fine in any writing that takes a conversational or informal tone. They needn’t be reserved just for dialogue. You don’t need to use them with care or caution. Sprinkle liberally throughout your writing.
Passive Voice Should Never Be Used
This is a tricky one because you’re often told, in an educational setting, to never write in the passive voice, oh, except in the situations where you must always use the passive voice. Very annoying. Generally speaking, you’re supposed to use the passive voice for science writing and never any other time. But I disagree. I think there are plenty of valid uses for the passive voice in all kinds of writing, as long as you know what you’re doing. Briefly:
The girl kicked the ball.
The ball was kicked by the girl.
Okay, I can see why the second one is less compelling. But what about these:
Squirrels all over the world love acorns.
Acorns are loved by squirrels all over the world.
One of those examples is active and the other one is passive, and they’re both fine. Is this sentence leading into a section about squirrels? Or a discussion about acorns? Because if you want to highlight acorns more than squirrels, the second one might be preferable.
Mixing in a sentence in the passive voice every now and then when you’re mainly using the active adds variation to your writing that can be very appealing. Sometimes you just can’t phrase a passive sentence any other way without doing linguistic gymnastics. And if you have a character who speaks in the passive voice by design, that’s totally fine. That tells the reader something about that character—they speak in a stilted and formal way (kind of like Henry Standing Bear). Maybe they’re a scientist and they can’t turn it off. Grammar helping software will highlight every instance of passive voice, but that doesn’t mean you have to remove them all.
Eliminate Jargon With Extreme Prejudice
Jargon is the specialized terminology of a profession or activity. Legal jargon, medical jargon, rock-climbing jargon. You get told as a general rule not to use it in writing because it’s confusing for lay people. You know what else is confusing? Nadsat. Look: Anytime you’re throwing around a lot of terms that aren’t commonly known to a wide audience, you have to use caution—whether it’s jargon or fictional slang in a science fictional or fantasy setting. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t do it.
If you’re writing a story that is told in a setting where the characters would normally use and hear jargon, it would be very strange not to include any. Remember the TV show ER? It was chock full of medical jargon and the writers and characters rarely stopped to explain it and a huge audience of regular people just rolled with it every week. If your paramedic character says, in the middle of an emergent medical event, “I need you to insert an intravenous catheter so we can get some saline solution into this patient quickly!” no one is going to find that character believable. “Get an IV going and push some fluids, stat!” sounds much more realistic.
Most of the time you can work jargon in by showing your reader what it means through character actions that accompany dialogue. In the example from the previous paragraph, for instance, if you were concerned that your reader might not understand the medical jargon, you could compensate by having your character shove a sloshing bag of fluids and some medical-grade tubing into another character’s arms while they’re saying it. Another solution—the Harry Potter Solution to Everything—is to have a character who is new to the activity or profession and needs terms explained to them. A reader surrogate.
Advice to remove jargon indiscriminately is bad advice. Use jargon wisely; you’ll be fine.
Avoid Double Negatives
You’ve probably received blanket advice to never use a double negative. That’s the rule. But there are several kinds of double-negative constructions, in fact, and all of them have their uses and caveats.
Two negative clauses to express an ironic or understated positive (litotes): ex, “I can’t say I won’t go” (meaning, “I might go”);
Two negative clauses to express an emphatic positive: ex, “There ain’t no other way” (meaning, “this way is the only way”);
Two negative clauses to express a negative: ex, “I didn’t do nothing” (meaning, “I did not do anything”)
Part of the reason we get warned not to do this in writing is because it can be challenging to convey which one you mean. If a character, frustrated, shouts, “But there ain’t no other way!” they could mean “this is the only way—there is not another way” or they could mean “it is incorrect that there is no other way—there is one other way” depending on the context. Without the inflection of speech, it could be difficult to tell. Fortunately, the typesetting gods have given us plenty of ways to mimic the intricacies of speech:
You could use quotation marks: “But there ain’t ‘no other way’!”
You could use italics: “But there ain’t no other way!” versus “But there ain’t no other way!”
Rules can be bent and broken. Using litotes in rhetorical writing goes all the way back to antiquity. People use double negatives in speech to form negatives and positives all the time. If people speak that way, it’s not wrong to write that way, especially if you’re writing dialogue. Just take care to make sure your meaning isn’t ambiguous—unless you intend for it to be ambiguous.
One Rule You Never Break
I lied. There is one rule of writing—as well as speaking and just general language use—that I believe is hard and fast and should never be broken, by anyone, and it is this:
If you don’t know for certain what a word means don’t use it.
If you’ve picked up a word through hearing others use it and from context you’re 99.9 percent sure what it means and how to use it—check. Check before you use it. Look it up or ask someone. Break this rule at your peril. It’s so easy to check and see what a word or phrase means before you use it. You do not want to use the phrase screw the pooch in a business meeting because you thought it was a gambling term only to find out later from your boss that it has a much more literal and less savory meaning than you thought. Take my word on that.
I hope you enjoyed today’s grammar jamboree. I didn’t get to all the grammar rules that I think deserve to be broken early, broken often, and broken with reckless abandon—so you can look forward to a sequel in the days ahead. Meanwhile, get ready for an examination of one of my favorite fallacies and what it means for your writing life, coming up next Tuesday. Have a great weekend!
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So I thought "caca", as in "this tastes like caca", meant ...something yucky. Only after using it in a client meeting did I learn better. Similarly, "wanker". Other cultures' language and slang are tricky.