So, Why Are We Still Talking About Rules?

Grammar rules aren’t exactly rules. They’re more… guidelines.

Oh, they’re important guidelines to know. But I hate to break it to you, but they didn’t come down from God on high. Heck, as Christians we don’t believe that we have to live by the letter of every law that came down from God on high, either, or none of us would eat bacon. But leaving that aside, grammar rules just aren’t in the same category. If you leave a comma out of a list of nouns, you haven’t broken the law of God, nor have you made an error along the lines of claiming that 2+2 = 5. It’s not that you’re objectively wrong in all possible worlds. That doesn’t mean you’re not wrong, of course, but let’s get straight why you are (or might be) wrong.


Make Your Writing Easy to Understand

First, a popular example: “The panda eats, shoots and leaves.” Oops. We can still figure out what the writers of that sentence undoubtedly meant, of course. It’s silly to pretend that that sentence really means the panda is a rampaging gunman. No one would mean that, and everyone who hears it knows that, so that’s not what the sentence means. However, the first time you hear it, it forces you to think of rampaging gunman panda, at least if you’ve learned those pesky grammar guidelines well. And that just doesn’t work wonders for the tone they want to have. The point of grammar guidelines isn’t just to prevent long-term misunderstandings; it’s to prevent short-term misunderstandings. It’s to make it so that you don’t have to read that sentence, blink, and then figure out what they meant. The goal is to facilitate rapid, easy understanding. Reading a well-written book or essay or blog is easy. No parsing multiple possible meanings. No scrambling to figure out how that word relates to the rest of the sentence, as in, “Wait, is shoots an action taken by the panda or a thing eaten by the panda?” Grammar rules take away an awful lot of alternate meanings. They are the great spoilers of awful puns. They help the writer avoid double-takes. An intelligent reader can normally rule out alternate meanings anyway. But a good writer should do that job for them. Good writing flows smoothly and naturally. Comprehension is easy. Legalese, by the way, is a particular form of bad writing – good for its purpose, but generally bad – where the goal is not to make it easy to understand, but to make it impossible to misunderstand. Try to make your writing easy to understand.

Which leads me to a major point about grammar rules: Breaking them is usually no worse than a dozen other mistakes of bad writing. Breaking the comma rules leads to double-takes, forcing the reader to work a little harder to grasp what the writer was saying, so you should avoid breaking them under normal circumstances. But reckless use of pronouns can have the same effect. (“Wait, who is that she referring to?”) So can long, unwieldy sentences where you don’t keep your clauses in order. (For an example, let me see whether I can successfully befuddle you by the mad skills which once won me the prize of “Most Likely to Talk in Paragraphs” on my cross country team when our captains were giving everyone funny stand-out-type awards, skills which helped me do well in Spanish class because, believe it or not, they even transfer to foreign languages, skills at piling up clause after clause until, as Steven Brust says, they fall over; and if this hasn’t befuddled you yet, I can keep going for a good long time, but anyway, I think you get the point, and even though this sentence is absolutely grammatically correct, I do believe, it would be a really, really bad idea to try to use it for anything but an example of truly awful writing of a particular almost-awesome-but-actually-really-terrible sort.) So can using words like “utilize” instead of simpler options like “use.”

Now, to do grammar teachers justice, a number of them also teach you those other “rules” to avoid bad writing. I’ve heard quite a few people, including teachers, discouraging the use of utilize. But, well, those other rules can be a problem too, precisely because they are nearly always phrased as rules. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard things like, “Never start a sentence with because,” just to counter the bad writing of grade school kids writing in incomplete sentences which fail to make it clear just what they are explaining. Well, guess what – not only is it quite possible to write a complete sentence which begins with because, but it’s frequently a good idea, in writing, to use incomplete sentences. Why? Because it flows better sometimes. See, I could have said, “That’s because it flows better,” or even, oh the horror, “The reason why one should sometimes use incomplete sentences is that sometimes incomplete sentences flow better than complete sentences,” but the more I think about it, the less that strikes me as a good idea. It’s rules like that that slanted my writing more and more toward those horrific, unwieldy sentences. It’s rules like that that made my writing less and less comprehensible as I obtained more command of my language. If the point is to avoid double-takes, we’ve got to learn to use incomplete sentences sometimes. We’ve got to learn, in fact, that sometimes good writing is more than avoiding bad writing. All those things the teachers tell you? Guidelines. Useful guidelines. Learn them. Then disregard them when they hurt your writing.

So, why learn grammar rules? For the same reason we learn to enunciate clearly when we talk: so that people can understand us easily. Can your friends learn to decipher your speech if you mumble and stutter? Theoretically. And in fact they ought to try. But you had much better speak up. And you had really much better pay attention in school and learn how to write clearly. It’ll go better for you.


Write To Your Audience

Back to another reason why you might be wrong to ignore the so-called rules: You’ve got to figure out who your audience is and write accordingly. The rules they teach you in school are not, for the most part, hard-and-fast rules for good writing. But they do tell you how to thrive in the most formal situations. And they just tell you all those rules straight out! Everything you need to know to be taken seriously on formal occasions! Have you thought about how rare that is? I can’t tell you how often I’ve wished I knew whether my clothes were the right level of formal, or what I was supposed to do with my fork at a formal dinner, or whether a given joke was appropriate to retell to a particular set of people. Well, with grammar, if you’ve been paying attention in school, you don’t need to guess. Would you wear jeans and a T-shirt to an important job interview? I do hope not, unless it was an interview with Google. Neither should you use incomplete sentences when you write to your potential future employers – or, worse, to your doctoral dissertation committee!

It goes both ways, of course. What would be appropriate in a doctoral dissertation is wildly inappropriate in a text message or a children’s picture book. Obviously. Say what you will about “txt speech,” it generally reaches its audience. Should it become a more general style? Heavens, no. See goal #1 – we’d like to make writing easy to understand – and txt talk, because of its extreme push toward brevity, of necessity sacrifices easy understanding to some extent. But don’t get stubborn and whine about txt talk in a text message written from one teenage kid to another. It has its place in communication, and that’s its place. If you’re texting a teenage kid, you might consider trying it.

So, why learn grammar rules? For the same reason we obtain a good business suit: so that people will naturally take us seriously. Can potential associates ignore your slovenly attire and body odor and learn that what you have to say is valuable? Theoretically. And in fact they ought to try. But you had really much better freshen up. And you had really much better pay attention in school and learn how to write formally. It’ll go better for you.


And The Third Reason Is…

I don’t actually have a third reason. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t one, but it does mean that it would be foolish of me to spend too long racking my brain for another reason right now – likely finding a weak reason which would dilute this essay – just to obey the “rule” that “supporting paragraphs should come in threes.” That guideline would do just as well to be forgotten, or if not forgotten, at least swept under the rug. I absolutely did not learn it from examples of great writing. I have almost never seen it in great writing. I’ve really only seen it in the slavish writing of students.

And that’s what I wanted to say in closing: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a list of rules – any list of rules – will make you a great writer.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that no set of rules can help you, either. There are a lot of guidelines to help you. There’s a lot of advice out there. To give one example of an awesome book of advice, Donald Maass’ book Writing the Breakout Novel is extremely helpful, and paying attention to guidelines like “Tension on every page” can almost always make your writing better. It’s arrogant to assume that a set of rules has nothing to teach you.

But don’t assume that if you just obey a set of rules like those of Mr. Maass you’ll automatically achieve greatness. (The only reason that might be true is that some of his rules are impossible to obey just by thinking of obeying the rules. For example, he tells you to have a unique, compelling voice. Good luck pulling that off just by thinking, “Unique voice, unique voice, unique voice…”) There’s really only one kind of person who can teach you to become a great writer, and it’s not the grammar teachers. It’s the great writers. So don’t plan on learning from the rules alone. The rules can make it a lot easier to notice what’s going on in great writing, but it’s the great writing that is the measure of the rules, not the rules that are the measure of the writing. If great writing pretty much always follows a particular set of rules – and if the great writing that doesn’t follow those rules would be still greater if it did – then you’ve got yourself a good set of rules. If very little great writing follows a particular rule, you would still do well to ponder what pitfall the people who made up the rule were trying to avoid, but then you should avoid the pitfall without adopting the rule. Read great writing. Think about why it is great writing. Emulate great writing. And then, hardest of all, emulate great writing in your own style. That’s the only real way to learn to write well.






AFTERWORD: A CASE STUDY

Ever heard that you must never end a sentence with a preposition? It’s a popular rule among grammar nazis. Officially, I do believe it really is a “rule” of the English language. Whatever officially means. Which means that, since you must write to your audience, if I’m ever writing a doctoral dissertation I will go out of my way to avoid ending sentences with prepositions. But aside from that rather contrived circumstance, not only do I recklessly disregard that rule, I proudly and deliberately disregard it.

Why? Well, I hear it may be an urban legend that when someone confronted Winston Churchill about ending a sentence with a preposition, he said, “That is the kind of rule up with which I will not put!” but whether Churchill said it or not, it illustrates very nicely the kind of awkwardness that ensues when people actually obey that rule. Similarly, when my AP history teacher confronted me with a hanging preposition in one of my essays, I just asked, “Mr. Schooler, did you really want me to say, ‘on which the Han Empire depended’?” and he admitted that he did not. (I don’t remember exactly what the phrase was. It wasn’t really “on which the Han Empire depended.” But it was something like that.)

The fact is, slavishly following that rule makes your writing a whole lot harder to understand, not easier. Furthermore, great writing breaks that rule all the time. Pay attention while you read great authors, and you’ll definitely find some hanging prepositions. This informs me that the rule against hanging prepositions was a mistake by an overzealous rulemaker. Are there times when hanging prepositions make a sentence difficult to read? Yes. So avoid that. But there are also times when refusing to leave a hanging preposition make a sentence difficult to read. So avoid that. Unless your audience won’t take you seriously unless you bow to their wish never to end a sentence with a preposition. Then humor them. It’s a bad writer who won’t humor his audience.

Upon doing more Internet research, I find that I am far from the only person to beat up on that “rule.” I can find a lot of grammarians to throw punches right along with me. But my point is that I didn’t need to find a grammarian to figure out that that rule was worth throwing punches at. (Oo, yay, I was hoping a hanging preposition would slip into my writing naturally! Hello, hanging preposition! Make yourself at home!) All I needed to do was compare the flow of sentences breaking that rule with the flow of sentences contrived not to break it. To confirm my judgment, I paid attention while reading my favorite writers. That’s all that’s necessary. And you too can do that.


---This rant has been brought to you by: Melanie---