Perfect. Thank you @Mckk - I think that sums up nicely and precisely what I can do when I follow all the "rules" ...
Interesting blog post. I agree with it to an extent, though about half of those rules do have value. They should just be taken with a grain of salt -- add "unless you know what you're doing" to the end of them. This paragraph at the end made me curious: Are rules like the ones cited in the blog post cultural? I'm sure many are heavily language-dependent, though I have no idea whether, for example, writers from a particular background have been able to harness adverbs in a very compelling way. I also don't know how much localization goes into translating a book from one language to another. Do other languages have passive voice, and will a translator modify sentence structure to bring the result more inline with conventions in the target language? This all comes down to communicating effectively. Conventions matter when communicating. If a writer wants to get an idea across directly, they should take out the fluff so that the idea has a chance to shine. If they want the prose to be the focus, then they can take a more bold direction. It depends on the focus. I don't know much about the expectations for legal documents, but I can imagine professionals whose main focus isn't on writing appreciating some editorial help in getting their publications up to standard. A law treatise sounds like a technical document to me, which should probably put the ideas out front rather than the stylization. I can totally understand a more prescriptive policy at a publishing house like that, whereas a publisher of fiction would provide more leeway.
PARABLE We might compare the blog post to the sales rep and his belief that his colleague Jerry 'is a stickler for grammar.' 'You're so right, Buck...' say the gathered reps. But then Jerry does not submit ill-drafted proposals to clients, and it is Jerry who gets the deals. [From my manual Business to Creativity/Amazon]
I think they're cultural in terms of defaulting to a main-stream, status-quo voice? And since the main-stream and status-quo tends to be white American males...? It also tends to be a fairly attainable style, I'd say? I mean, people may like reading Joyce (some people, at least!) but I can't imagine there ever being a how-to book that gives instructions on how to write more like him! There are some African-American women with quite distinct styles (Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison) but emulating them would feel like a caricature, to me. I can't imagine recommending that a white man write like Alice Walker, but we make up rules of writing to inspire black women to write like Elmore Leonard... So I think there probably is a "default to the dominant culture" aspect to a lot of advice? I think.
Matt said: "I don't know much about the expectations for legal documents, but I can imagine professionals whose main focus isn't on writing appreciating some editorial help in getting their publications up to standard. A law treatise sounds like a technical document to me, which should probably put the ideas out front rather than the stylization. I can totally understand a more prescriptive policy at a publishing house like that, whereas a publisher of fiction would provide more leeway." I agree with you to a point. But the issue is one of maximizing clarity and readability, not the technical essence of the writing; I'd rarely if ever criticize or challenge one of our experts on that, since I was a generalist (except perhaps in editorial conference with other editors). But I would never hesitate to apply literary standards. As someone else has said, these are not so much rules as guidelines or conventions, geared toward all writing. Writing is much more than surrounding an idea or image with whatever words happen to be drifting past and jamming them into whatever structure is handy; it's got to be done in a way that draws the reader in and then gets out of his or her way. Fiction writing that is poorly written is, by definition and like all other writing, hard to read, and unlikely to be read to the end by other than the author's mother or some long-suffering and patient friend. Good writers follow convention unless they have good reason to do otherwise, but even when they flout convention for effect or for a specific purpose they do so knowingly. As opposed to lazy or unskilled writers, who simply don't know better. I suggest there's a world of difference between the two groups, and one is simply better than the other.
Some "rules" are little more than personal distaste expressed by notable persons, such as the "Don't end a sentence with a preposition" rule, attributed to poet laureate John Dryden. Perhaps at the time writers were indulging in this "sin" to excess, or perhaps it was simply a dyspeptic outburst by Mr. Dryden.
Oh god, for a moment I thought you were refuting @matwoolf haffily, gaffily goneward, but then I saw the second "t"...
When Churchill was chided for violating this rule, he replied: "That is the type of pedantry up with which I shall not put." Or as Bryan Garner wrote in his Elements of Legal Style (after pointing out that the so-called rule is a remnant of Latin grammar, not controlling of English) "Remember: prepositions are not necessarily bad words to end sentence with."
I'm learning to accept that my operating system is based in non-decimal primary numbers and will be understood by a very few. That's not a positive thing, but I can live with it. I hope.
Excellent points. Many writers certainly convey their own unique voice, which is often influenced by culture and non-English languages. The most interesting question to me here is where we draw the boundary between voice and “rules.” Some differences would be voice, and some would be genuine grammatical errors. How do we separate these? The oldest of these rules likely have roots in the 1,400 year development of the English language. This occurred mostly in England, of course, though it would be historically inaccurate to assume that there was no diversity in Europe at the time. That notwithstanding, most of the foundational writers of the language from that period were probably English, just as the foundational writers of any language would be those who first spoke it. To form a rough timeline of this development: 400s: Early English (Anglo-Saxons) 1000s: Middle English (Norman Conquest) 1300s: Chaucer 1400s: Early Modern English (Printing press) 1600s: Shakespeare 1600s-1700s: Spread of English across the world The language evolved quite a bit over this time. I’m not sure how many of the modern “rules” we can attribute to this period, though certainly it has its influences. The 1600s and 1700s are where things get interesting though, because around that time, English started to become a global language. This was not due to any merit of its own, but through colonial adventures by the British Empire. At this point we have a language that was written by English people in England being kind-of-imposed on colonies across the world. Many of the rules were already written by this point, but languages keep evolving nonetheless, and new rules replace the old ones. The English language evolved in England, and it has also evolved outside of England since around the 1600s. Thinking of the rules that are discussed in the original blog post, some of these have basis, and some of them are kind of inane. An example of an inane rule would be “never write in first / second / third person” — these bits of advice are of course contradictory. But some of these rules do have fundamental value, which we should consider directly on its merits. We should ask why should we follow this rule? And in many cases we can find an answer, with an asterisk. One justifiable rule is “minimize adverbs.” The blog post presents an absolute version of this rule, which is to never use adverbs, but no one actually follows that. The point is that adverbs modify a verb or adjective, which is often unnecessary. “She walked across the room boldly” often makes the language more clunky than it needs to be, because context already shows that the actor is bold — it so happens that she is walking across the room to confront someone who really deserves it, which is certainly a bold act. Stating it explicitly violates another rule, show not tell, which I think also has justifiable merit. All of these rules have an asterisk beside them though, since someone who knows what they are doing can violate them shamelessly. And this brings us back to the beginning of the post with the observation that many of the rules of English were written in England, but also the counterpoint that languages constantly evolve. For English to make the bold presumption that it is the “global language,” it will need to incorporate some measure of every culture that speaks it. The Internet is like the British Empire, but ideas are spread instantly rather than over the course of months by sailing ship. Our language is about to evolve considerably.
Don't forget the Romans from about 55 B.C.E. to 400 or so A.D. There are traces of Latin in the language, including the cities ending in "chester."
Haffily Gaffily Goneward - We need to get @matwoolf a t-shirt with that logo.... if he wears t-shirts.... god, who knows?
Yeah. Ultimately you can trace back every language to the language that was spoken before the new language came about, or migrated to a region. There are all sorts of influences and some of these rules probably go back a very long time. Cicero and people like him probably wrote a few of them, or at least preserved them.
But in this case the Romans were not sources of the original language, they imposed changes on it. Latin didn't evolve into English, it merely influenced it. I think the Saxons would have happily gone on with their native tongue, but its modern day evolved state would be significantly different.
A digression from the topic of this thread, but this is an interesting link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Britain Included in it is the notion that the Roman WRITTEN language survived long after the Romans officially left Britain. (The other languages, native and incomer, were not written languages, so Latin would have an advantage there.) Latin, as a language, certainly survived as the official spoken language of the Church as well. The 'Saxons,' as such, didn't coincide with the Romans in Britain, but came about a century after the Romans left. Meanwhile, the earlier inhabitants of these islands, who all had different languages and origins from each other, continued to live here, and intermix with whoever else arrived. No wonder the language we call 'English' is such a colourful hash, in which 'rules' have so many exceptions to them. I think that's what sets English apart from most other European-based languages, and can make it difficult for a foreigner to learn—all those exceptions to rules. Yikes. She said, neatly steering discussion back in the direction of the original thread topic...
Okay, I read about this too, on the Wikipedia page "Common English usage misconceptions", but here's the thing, throughout that article, they repeatedly quote hard core grammarians saying things like, "Chaucer did it. It's not a 'real' rule." So what if he did? There are no "real" rules. There's no standard text accepted by the world as the real and only official rules of English, and if there were, it wouldn't adhere to fourteenth century (time of Chaucer) rules. The John Dryden thing happened four centuries ago. If something is adopted by the entire English speaking world and taught in text books for generations, that's as close as it gets to an official rule. It doesn't matter when it was made up or by whom. Almost every grammar and spelling rule we have began its life as misusage. That's why we don't speak middle English or old English or some Germanic antecedent or grunt like cave people. Things change. Grammarians fight inevitable lexicographal language trends. I know. I'm one of them. We're annoying, but it takes a special brand of stubbornness to turn around and tell the people who are bitching about other people's English that they too are wrong because their rules are less than seven-hundred years old. They wouldn't use or teach anything else from Chaucer as proper modern English. They're just being contrary. Hell, modern puntuation doesn't even go back as far as the Victorian era. Nineteenth century punctuation will get you failed right out of any ninth grade English class in the world. From the Wikipedia page: The saying "This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put", apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill satirizes the awkwardness that can result from prohibiting sentence-ending prepositions.Sure. It satirizes it just fine, but if you want to follow the almost universally accepted form, the sentence is, "I will not put up with this sort of nonsense." That's not awkward. It's easy.
Maybe a less contentious word than 'rule' for essentially the same concept is 'convention.' Our goal, when writing, is nearly always communication (unless the writer is merely playing with words.) So being aware of current SPAG conventions (which evolve, and can also be contradictory) will ensure that people who are familiar with those conventions will understand what you write. If you stray too far away from these conventions—either deliberately or out of ignorance—readers will struggle to figure out what you're saying. One common convention, for example, is to end most sentences with a period (full stop if you're British) or a question mark if the sentence asks a question, or an exclamation mark if you want to convey surprise or urgency. Can you end a sentence with a blank space instead? Or a comma? Or an asterisk? Or the numbers 12345? Yes, of course you can ...but most readers won't automatically figure out what you're doing—the way they will automatically recognise the sentence has ended, if you use a period, question mark or exclamation mark. They may figure out your unique approach (and maybe ask themselves why in heck you're playing with convention) or they may just get confused, or maybe walk away because they can't be arsed trying to figure you out. Conventions can certainly get complicated, but it's a good idea to know what the conventions are, for the time and the audience you're writing for. Break them if you want to, by all means, but there will be consequences. As long as you accept the consequences, more power to your arm! Break away. Lots of successful authors have done just that. And some of these are admired for their lack of convention, while others get drubbed for the same thing. So it goes....
Sure, Churchill was exaggerating to prove a point, and I think he did it well. I agree that the preposition thing is a well-established convention, and that most "violations" of it are irritating if not outright jarring and ought to be changed. But some exceptions are appropiate because they have become, well, conventional. Like"Who should I make the check out to?" (from https://magoosh.com/pro-writing/can-you-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition/)
Well, one's a word; the other's a slang term, sometimes, but not necessarily derogatory, but depending on the situation, you could often interchange the two. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/grammarian?s=t A grammarian is sometimes a professional expert, sometimes not. In a debate about immutable rules of spelling, punctuation and grammar verses naturally evolving language (something that occurs frequently on WF,) the person who believes in the rules could be referred to as a grammarian, and the person who believes language is whatever we say it is, would be a lexicographer, yet another term that can denote professional expertise or simply knowledge of and enthusiasm in the concept. Most people who care a lot about language and proper usage fall somewhere in between the two and adhere to certain rules while following consensus on others, like people who embrace slang as part of the lexicon, but rant about improper use of the word "literal". Personally, I find language trends fascinating, but I have my pet peeves like anyone else. A big one for me is then/than confusion. It really irks me for some reason. Of course, these are all rules on language, not silly, made up rules about storytelling, which is what the article in the OP referenced.
