You Must Know When To Break The Rules

I don’t know if you’d believe this by reading my blog posts, but I used to be a bit of a grammar Nazi. I wanted to master the English language and rid my writing of all comma splices, subject/verb disagreements, run-ons, capitalization errors, etc. Colloquial expressions were a no-no. And ain’t? Don’t even get me started.

If you were writing a term paper and needed someone to go to for help, I was your man. I knew the rules of the English language and taught them at every opportunity.

As I read more and more fiction by authors like Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) and Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit To Brooklyn and Requiem For A Dream), I realized that it was not their perfect grammar that drew me into their stories (because, to be perfectly honest, neither author has/had perfect grammar). I realized that they broke many of the rules that I had learned about English. Selby’s punctuation was very unusual; he often used slashes instead of apostrophes (example: it/ll instead of it’ll). And Irvine Welsh’s characters hardly spoke proper English. When he quoted his characters, he didn’t write the English language; he wrote the Scottish dialect, the way it was truly spoken.

And then I looked at my own writing, so perfect and intentional, yet so boring and completely lacking in authenticity. And then I realized that, in order to write anything worth a damn, anything true, I was going to have to break the rules. Or maybe you could argue that the rules of the term paper do not apply to fiction writing. And they damn sure don’t apply to the rules of my blog.

Rules are made to be broken (at the right time).

Rules are very rarely absolute. Just look at the English language itself.

i before e except after c. That rule’s kind of weird. Weird, huh, look at that. That word doesn’t follow the i before e rule.

For all of you business students earning your degrees right now, the rules of big business that your professors are teaching you don’t apply to the rules of small business. So, unless you work for a Fortune 500 company, you’ll most likely have to break or disregard those rules that are being drilled into your head as you sit through those lectures.

If you had a boss who left you in charge of his shop and said, “I’ll be out of town; don’t call me,” I’m sure he’d appreciate a call if the place were to somehow burn to the ground. Maybe that example was a little obvious, but it’s not up to me to judge.

So, to close, ask yourself from time to time if you need to break some rules. Are the rules that you’re following truly absolute? Can they never be broken?

What are some other rules that need to be broken at times? Share!