There are the rules, and then there are the breaking of the rules. Great writers break the rules.
I’m not a great writer, but I do break the rules. I do it naturally because I grew up reading the classics. On today’s standards, the classics are replete with broken rules.
I didn’t know I was being disobedient, or at least I didn’t know until I taught my children grammar (a subject conveniently left out of my progressive Marin County education) when I homeschooled them, and I had to quickly learn grammar beforehand.
Also, I naturally tend to write longer sentences, as people used to do, which I’ve had to learn to shorten to meet the requirements of the modern blogging world.
Anyhow, it took me a long time to figure out what I was doing as a writer, because editors would edit my work and put in all the perfunctory punctuation and make trite my syntax, and I let them.
I didn’t know any better.
And then I found this book, Figures of Speech, 60 ways to turn a phrase by Arthur Quinn.
It was the day I quit listening to editors like they were God. Many of them edit according to the rules.
“Style, someone said, is like a frog; you can dissect the thing but it somehow dies in the process.” —Arthur Quinn
Don’t get me wrong, I love editors, and there are outstanding editors in the field, but sometimes breaking the rules is precisely what makes your piece interesting. A great editor will let you do this.
For fun, I took a paragraph out of Tolstoy’s, Anna Karenina, and put it to the Grammarly test.
Leo Tolstoy, one of Russia’s greatest writers, did not pass. Look at what Grammarly did to Tolstoy.
Yes, Grammarly is not without its flaws, but it helps me when I leave out a comma or put in one too many.
In using Grammarly, I quickly learned to ignore other things like when Grammarly cries that my sentence is wordy because it’s too long, or a word is used too often just as you see in the Tolstoy piece.
Not that I’m comparing myself to Tolstoy.
But as a reminder, when you turn a phrase and like it, and someone tells you it’s bad grammar or poorly punctuated, think Tolstoy.
Grammarly did not pass Tolstoy, and Tolstoy did not need Grammarly.
