How loose are the grammar rules in novel writing?

Laer Carroll said:

I hope not. AW is supposed to be about discussion of all aspects of writing. No one should feel they have no right to submit ideas to a discussion.

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I merely meant for this thread (aside from this comment). I haven't seen anything that changes my thoughts on grammar.

AW Admin said:

I am not meaning to be snotty, but you're talking to a philologist. Grammar does not mean what you seem to think it means. Grammar is the description of how a language functions; it's based on empirical evidence.

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I believe grammar means a different thing to a linguist / philologist than to an English teacher, and the latter is probably more relevant to writing for publication. Grammar to an English teacher is prescriptive, not descriptive.

And both change, albeit slowly.

The original poster's question suggests a larger one: Can we break the rules of grammar when writing novels? Just how loose can we be?

I'd say we should be very careful when we break any of the rules of grammar or ignore widely accepted principals of usage. They exist for reasons. This includes clear understanding by readers, who share those rules and principles. This includes smooth flowing of sentences. And probably for other reasons philologists like AW Admin have discovered.

Inside dialogue and other kinds of speech we can break rules to suggest the speaker is poorly educated. Or someone who is ill or injured. Or in a hurry. Or deliberately breaking them to confuse people, or express anger. Or to make a point of some kind.

Outside speech rule-breaking may be in service of some larger purpose. A series of sentence fragments can suggest choppy hurried action. When the fragments have an inferred subject common to a previous sentence they can shorten a paragraph they are in. And probably lots of other reasons.

But I'd say we should always understand the reasons for the grammar rules and usage principles we are breaking, at least intuitively if not consciously. And our reasons behind our "broken" writing.

Grammar is a set of rules, not unlike the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.

Humans are more fault-tolerant than a computer. You can break a few rules and still be understood. Break too many, and you can't. The more you break, the harder you are to understand. But if you have a good reason, it can be worth it.

morngnstar said:

Grammar is a set of rules, not unlike the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken.

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But unless you understand these rules, and the reasons for their existence, you are likely to produce a lot of just plain bad writing, if you adopt the idea that grammar really doesn't matter (which seems to be implied by some of the posts in this thread). To succeed in producing readable narrative, you can't be just random about your sentence constructions, etc. If, for instance, you have a narrative character who is unschooled in formal prose grammar, you can certainly violate the "standard" rules and make that work. Mark Twain famously did that with Huck Finn. But even in those circumstances, the choice you make imposes its own informal rules as to how you construct your narrative, and it helps a lot to be cognizant of the formal grammar structures, as Twain most certainly was.

And grammar is not synonymous with word choice. The concept that grammar "evolves" has validity, but it evolves pretty slowly. You can pick up any decent novel from, say, the early 20th century, and you'll find that the grammatical structures aren't very different from those in currency today. Style may vary a good deal, because that evolves much more quickly. Word meanings, even more so. A couple of centuries ago, the word "gay" merely meant "happy". In later Victorian times, that word had come to be associated with prostitutes. Today, of course, it is associated with homosexuality. But those changes in word meaning have nothing to do with grammar, or grammatical rules of construction.

This is an important distinction, IMO, because we have more than once here had people opine that "grammar" was unimportant, an academic fetish not worth a writer's time or energy to really understand. Some of the comments in this thread have verged on expressing that same view.

caw

I don't think the rules of grammar are loose at all.

What I do think is that breaking or bending the rules can create a form of linguistic tension that you can use to create specific effects in your writing. When you know what you're doing it's like Jimi Hendrix on a distortion pedal; when you don't it's like a blown speaker.