How to break the rules?

I frequently use both sentence fragments and run-ons for rhythm. Prose isn't so unlike poetry, after all.

Laer Carroll said:

I'm going out. Alone. To meet the love of my life.

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This works for me. It represents a pattern of speech that can't be represented by any other punctuation. What it is is a complete sentence. And then the speaker thinks of something they want to add. Making another complete sentence.

Authors as prominent as Stephen King and Ray Bradbury use all kinds of sentence fragments, very effectively. For fictional narrative, this device is absolutely nothing to worry about.

As for "rules", Everything you write sets up its own "rules" starting with Sentence 1. Consistency of style is the governing principle, and inconsistency or randomness is going to make a bad moon rise in the minds of most readers.

caw

The example you gave is fine. I often do that. So does Lee Child in his Jack Reacher novels. It's a dynamic way of writing and is a terrific tool to aid pacing and impact.

I don't worry about whether something is grammatically correct when I write. If it 'sounds' OK in my head and works in the context of everything around it, I'm happy. I had a conversation in another thread where this would be described as a style rather than a grammar issue, but that's unimportant. Writing is about communicating ideas to readers, so whatever works, works! I see rules as restrictions, and that's a bad thing, in my opinion, for any artistic pursuit.

Ironically for an industry constantly at war with pirates, we follow the Code. Those rules? They're more what you might call guide lines.

Think of the rules as a level-one class in ballet or gymnastics or ice skating. You need to know how all the moves and parts work so that you can execute a routine, hit your beats with your chosen music, and not hurt yourself in the process. They allow you to look good and convey the effect and/or feeling you want to convey. Some people, even given this same foundation will be better at it that others.

Once you've got those basics in your bones, you can start playing around with form to see what does and doesn't work. You can cut your turns at new angles or rearrange you arms, pacing or landings. You can execute moves that aren't technically right, but they still look stunning in performance, and they fit your routines perfectly. The audience loves them - and looks for them - even if the purists say you're not playing in bounds.

You can't really get to that second place without first laying the ground work of the beginning stages.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post here yet, but I will anyway (is that breaking the rules )
Words and language can be moulded to reflect the sounds they should create. So if you have something very staccato then lots of full stops and illegal short sentences can work nicely. Whereas if something is dragging on then a lot of commas and run on sentences can create that effect.
That's one main way where I break the rules of grammar to make something sound more like it should.

With respect to the original quotation "I'm going out. Alone. To meet the love of my life." - that extra emphasis highlights the person's thought/speech process and makes the "Alone" a very powerful word in the line. "I'm going out alone, to meet the love of my life." is not nearly as powerful.

ikennedy said:

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post here yet, but I will anyway (is that breaking the rules )

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Of course you can post here. And that was an excellent post, just by the way.

mccardey said:

Of course you can post here. And that was an excellent post, just by the way.

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Yep, what mccardey said. And welcome to AW, ikennedy!

ikennedy said:

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post here yet, but I will anyway (is that breaking the rules )
Words and language can be moulded to reflect the sounds they should create. So if you have something very staccato then lots of full stops and illegal short sentences can work nicely. Whereas if something is dragging on then a lot of commas and run on sentences can create that effect.
That's one main way where I break the rules of grammar to make something sound more like it should.

With respect to the original quotation "I'm going out. Alone. To meet the love of my life." - that extra emphasis highlights the person's thought/speech process and makes the "Alone" a very powerful word in the line. "I'm going out alone, to meet the love of my life." is not nearly as powerful.

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Yep, again. Spot-on.

ikennedy said:

Words and language can be moulded to reflect the sounds they should create. So if you have something very staccato then lots of full stops and illegal short sentences can work nicely.

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Within limits. Do. Not. Punctuate. Every. Word. I don't think punctuation just represents various lengths of pause. It still has a meaning. The periods in Laer's example each ended a complete sentence. They were just three overlapping sentences.

Whereas if something is dragging on then a lot of commas and run on sentences can create that effect.
That's one main way where I break the rules of grammar to make something sound more like it should.

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I don't think you should ever use a literal run on there is no legitimate reason to do this. If what you mean is a long, complex sentence, with many clauses, dependent and independent, taking you on an epic journey, where you forget, by the time you get to the end, where you started, and where you were going, then by all means yes use that.

morngnstar said:

Within limits. Do. Not. Punctuate. Every. Word. I don't think punctuation just represents various lengths of pause. It still has a meaning. The periods in Laer's example each ended a complete sentence. They were just three overlapping sentences.

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I agree that punctuation has meaning, of course it does. I just think that it can be manipulated. But I disagree that it cannot be used after every word. One character in a novel of mine, once (more than that would be annoying to read) speaks with a full stop after every word. It highlights the emphasis of each word and the tone of voice.

I did mean run on sentences actually. I know they are annoying and should not be used, but they CAN be used for effect. Also your example works fine too, with all those clauses. It does not break the rules, though.

(thanks for the welcome!)

ikennedy said:

I agree that punctuation has meaning, of course it does. I just think that it can be manipulated. But I disagree that it cannot be used after every word. One character in a novel of mine, once (more than that would be annoying to read) speaks with a full stop after every word. It highlights the emphasis of each word and the tone of voice.

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I'm not dead-set against it. It could be right depending on voice, particularly if your voice is set to melodramatic teenager. I'm not sure period is the right punctuation. I'd prefer something that's a pure pause indicator, like an ellipsis.

Also, it's a rather cheap and easy way to show firmness. Fine once or twice, but more than that, prove to us you know another way to show it.

I did mean run on sentences actually. I know they are annoying and should not be used, but they CAN be used for effect.

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I'd have to see an example to be convinced. They are not only annoying, they don't reflect any natural pattern of speech. They are purely used by people who don't have a grasp of the meaning of punctuation. Unless you're talking about the relatively benign kind where you forget the rule about how a comma follows "and" if it's a compound sentence.

Also your example works fine too, with all those clauses. It does not break the rules, though.

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Yeah. The rules are quite rich and flexible. You can do a lot without breaking them. Saying they should be violated is a little like saying chess would be better if the pawn could move sideways. But since I don't believe in hard limits on creativity, I do say break or bend the rules sometimes in your writing.

I find an ellipsis is more of a pause with a wait, whereas a full stop is a definitive stop perhaps without much of a wait after it. They function differently in my head.
Oh I know it would not work more than once or twice with that full stop staccato thing, that's why I said it only happened once. More than that would dilute the effect.

An example of something with run on sentences could be a drug affected mind spilling all thoughts together and giving the impression of a lack of control of thought.

morngnstar said:

Yeah. The rules are quite rich and flexible. You can do a lot without breaking them. Saying they should be violated is a little like saying chess would be better if the pawn could move sideways. But since I don't believe in hard limits on creativity, I do say break or bend the rules sometimes in your writing.

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That's a bit of a straw man argument there. Of course I don't say that a pawn should move sideways. Also I didn't say that rules should be broken all the time. They can be broken occasionally though for effect, which is what I think the original post was about. In the end I think we are agreeing with each other.

ikennedy said:

I find an ellipsis is more of a pause with a wait, whereas a full stop is a definitive stop perhaps without much of a wait after it. They function differently in my head.

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You're right there. I don't know a better way. I just know there's something wrong about a period there.

An example of something with run on sentences could be a drug affected mind spilling all thoughts together and giving the impression of a lack of control of thought.

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That's a good example of a long sentence with no punctuation, but it's not a run-on sentence, and it's not ungrammatical. I don't even think you could legally add a comma to that sentence if you wanted to, except maybe after mind, but with a slight change in meaning.

That's a bit of a straw man argument there. Of course I don't say that a pawn should move sideways.

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I just said it's a little like that, not a lot.

In the end I think we are agreeing with each other.

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I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

Hah, I wasn't using my sentence talking about a drug addled mind as an example. I was saying that in those circumstances you could use run on sentences that conveyed that idea. I should have been clearer.

ikennedy said:

I did mean run on sentences actually. I know they are annoying and should not be used, but they CAN be used for effect.

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I agree. Some people do talk in run-on sentences.

Laer Carroll said:

Technically, sentence fragments are ungrammatical because they lack parts of a complete sentence: the subject, verb, or the object. The unspoken rule that makes the above paragraph workable is: Combine the fragments with several others, to make a whole expression.

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Technically, sentence fragments are a thing and fall under written rules. To break the rules successfully, you have to know what you're doing, right? And that can be summed up into a rule. Maybe it's not taught at Grammar 101 class but if one wants to be a writer and work with the language it's worth exploring further than level 101. As your quote said, there other rules. We also teach kids not to play with matches and that matches are bad because you can burn your house down with them, but when kids grow up they learn that there other rules for matches which can be very useful (light the gas stove and cook your dinner). It's just a different level of learning with a different set of rules. A lot of technical, legal or journalistic writing may also sound ungrammatical to a person who's only read fiction and is only familiar with Grammar 101. And yet there are rules for that, too. But I don't think there's a blog on the internet covering those, so probably that makes lots of people think it doesn't exist.

Enlightened said:

Something basic, double punctuation in sentences. "Get out of the way!" said John. Grammatically, it is incorrect. Maybe this is not what you were after.

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If you go exploring further into the matter of how and why dialogue is punctuated, you'd understand why the above example is, actually, correct. Of course, it appears to be breaking the rule of "start with a capital letter after an exclamation mark" but, in fact, there are other rules which apply here.

blacbird said:

As for "rules", Everything you write sets up its own "rules" starting with Sentence 1.

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So, you're saying that one can introduce any rule they like and start putting % instead of full stops, for example. One can go rule-breaking even further and just start replacing the letter "a" with %. Ignore any rule, it's all fine. But then that may kinda ruin the experience of some readers and leave the author a bit lonely in the market

Anyway, I think the question "how do we break the rules" is just taking the discussion into a different direction and we don't end up learning anything. Because, if we can break any rule, then we can do whatever we want and not take anything into account. We just write as we feel like it. And then it's a mystery why the rejections come.

In general, sticking to rules is the safe way. If you go with what's tried and true, you're more likely to create something that is acceptable and actually sells. Rule breaking is risky, like creativity itself is risky - you're pairing one or more things with another that isn't usually paired; you're doing something out of ordinary, and it might turn out well or it might just suck, depending on a lot of factors (for example, the experience the author has with a particular device such as sentence fragments). It's just like innovation.

I agree that you break some rules and follow others. Most of the time, if you want to write a book that people read, you can't be too innovative and too unfamiliar in your writing. You have to couple the familiar with the unfamiliar, the same way authors sometimes come up with new concepts based on old ones, using something new and untried and putting it into something old. I'd assert that creative writing depends on the breaking of rules - done in a sensible way (with "sensible" being a very subjective term).

Any rule can be broken, but it all depends on the end result, whether it sits well with the rest of the book, whether there are other things that compensate for it, and so on. The thing with breaking rules is that you can't predict if it'll turn out good or bad. But then, when you sit down to write a book, you can never really predict if it'll turn out good or bad either. Writing is a creative act. It's not a science. There are too many variables and you tinker with some of them and it changes the result somewhat, and you can't say with certainty which particular variable affected your end result because there are so many factors at work in a book.

Long story short, rule breaking is possible and a good thing. Without breaking rules, you'll never learn anything new or create something new that actually works. It's a process of learning. You learn what to break, how to break it, and whether it'll work or just look a mess.

I don't know if I'm talking about writing here or life in general. Well, same thing I'd say.

SKara said:

Without breaking rules, you'll never learn anything new or create something new that actually works. It's a process of learning.

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I don't think there's much new left to create by breaking the rules. We have a whole century of experimental writing where a lot of "new" was done and I haven't seen anything "new" invented since the beat generation. Do you have any examples of new stuff created by breaking the rules?

OP's example is effectively dialogue. It may not have quotes but first person is often dialogue with the reader, so can follow the same rules for speech and voice.


Other than that just going to agree with Curlz and others to say that a lot of the wrong examples given in these kinds of discussion are often not particularly wrong.

Curlz said:

Do you have any examples of new stuff created by breaking the rules?

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Depends on what you mean by rules. By rules I mean the standards set by the industry, what people consider normal. It could be linguistic rules, what's considered good grammar for example (using complete sentences), or it could be genre conventions or expectations from a book (e.g. don't kill the main character/narrator).

Experimental writing did happen a lot in the past (E. E. Cummings breaking punctuation rules). A modern example is Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, an unconventional YA book not written in chronological order - and the stakes only appear very late in the story. I'm not exactly a fan of The Night Circus but I think Morgenstern handled it pretty well and there was her world building and her writing style to compensate for all the broken "rules".

In general, you can break rules but there has to be something redeeming about it, or it has to be done in a way that functions well. Besides, there are multiple things working in a story on different levels, and a few broken rules don't have to make or break the end result.

I believe that would qualify as moving the discussion goal posts ;-)

There are no rules for style or narrative structure the way there tend to be for syntax and semantics (grammar). Out of chronological order is not new.

For poetry, there are no rules at all, unless you choose to implement them (eg sonnets). You can do what you like; language as art. I might not enjoy every poem I read but I would never say a poem has been done wrong.

Harlequin said:

I might not enjoy every poem I read but I would never say a poem has been done wrong.

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Exactly. Language and art are subjective and flexible. The idea of "wrong" is subjective as well. The rules that have emerged are not exactly wrong or right; they just managed to stay because they worked at the time they originated, for the author or the readers or just the general culture. If I can get away with an E. E. Cummings style while I'm writing a novel, it wouldn't exactly be wrong - not if it is accepted and becomes a thing and serves a function.

Rules are always evolving according to culture and context. The idea of what is acceptable at any time is also changing. A book title like The Hate U Give is not grammatically correct, but it's a published book and reflects the influence of culture on what is acceptable in terms of writing/language at a given time. Language is always reflecting culture and being shaped by it.

Here's an interesting quote by Steven Pinker (psychology professor - but he's written a lot on language as well) writing in The Guardian.

"Linguists and lexicographers have long known that many of the alleged rules of usage are actually superstitions. They originated for oddball reasons, violate the grammatical logic of English, degrade clarity and style, and have been flouted by the best writers for centuries."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/b...pinker-alleged-rules-of-writing-superstitions

yes... I'm aware language changes ;-) I've studied sociolinguistics to MSc level (not that you'd know it from my hackneyed posts, mind). I'm not calling authority on that because I haven't got any. But maybe it will contextualise my mindset a little more. Or maybe not; ignore if so.

Conventions do change all the time, but I'd still argue there are very fundamental rules which don't alter so much. Perhaps they're not generally thought of as rules.

A very fast and loose example - in English you can put apple and pie together to get 'apple pie' (or book and case for bookcase), and have those words/phrases mean something, but you cannot do that in French. It must be 'pie of apples' instead. That kind of rule is a little harder to break while still remaining understandable by other people speaking your respective language.

So tying into that... I think Curlz' broader argument still stands, which is that a lot of the things touted as wrong are often not rules at all. A couple classic examples often set up in crit groups, for example, is that you can't start sentences with conjunctions, or that passive voice is always bad; both of those aren't rules by any means. However, they still get held up as "rules you can break" and that's exasperating. I'm not seeing many examples here, either, but I did skim (on phone) so perhaps missed them.

Harlequin said:

a lot of the things touted as wrong are often not rules at all. A couple classic examples often set up in crit groups, for example, is that you can't start sentences with conjunctions, or that passive voice is always bad; both of those aren't rules by any means. However, they still get held up as "rules you can break" and that's exasperating.

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Totally agree. They're repeated so often that they look like rules but really are just guidelines, which are helpful to have but not necessary (like it's helpful to have an outline when you're writing, but it's not necessary to stick to it). Like you guys said, there are few exact rules that actually serve a necessary function - like in your examples - and you can't do without them most of the time.

By the way, your MSc in Sociolinguistics sounds pretty impressive. I haven't studied anything to MSc level, so . . . yeah