In writing, "rules" is a relative term. The most important thing to me when reading is consistent tense agreement and proper use of vocabulary. I am quickly distracted and lose interest in a reading if the author tries to plop down a big word and uses it incorrectly, or switches from present to past tense in the same sentence. It's bad form, and can be fixed with a bit of quick proofreading.
Of course, everybody we've been reading has progressed far beyond amateur status, so the basics come naturally to them, and they don't really need to worry about "rules" so much as flow. The people we've been reading for the most part follow grammatical conventions, but with personal style. Leakey starts sentences with conjunctions for emphasis. Bilger doesn't put quotes around the things people are saying. Neither does Cormac McCarthy, and he's doing alright.
What we've been reading lately has always involved people. We've been reading stories about people doing stuff, which has allowed plenty of opportunity for active verbs. Passive verbs still appear, but not in annoying abundance — they serve a purpose, like when Leakey says "It was the back of a small skull" (198). There's not a better way to state that, and the passive verb among the active in that case serves to emphasize the importance of the thing they found.
I never thought much about passive verbs much until I took Professional Writing with Dr. Mark Schlenz last semester, but now I am painfully aware of every time I use one. And I must say, that one small rule has improved my writing both in efficiency and interestingness (as Dr. Downs would say).
I enjoy starting sentences with conjunctions every once in a while, like I did in the previous sentence. Sentence fragments also occasionally appear in my writing, usually when I am trying to describe the sensations or emotions of a scene.
There are a few meaningless words I try to avoid like "really," "many," "only," and "just;" I also try to avoid redundancy by simply saying "different things" instead of "various different things" and stuff like that.
As the cliché goes, "when you know the rules you can break them." I'm no expert, but I feel that anybody who reads and writes regularly can develop a personal rule-breaking style and make sure it works by reading their writing out loud. If it's distracting or impossible to read without pausing, it doesn't work. If it flows, it works.
I could write about writing and grammar for days, but we're all intelligent people here. We still can't get lazy and stop proofreading our work, because a piece of writing is never "finished." It can always improve. So going into our final project, I think the best results will come from an early draft with extensive revision.
Written like a true editor :)
ReplyDeleteI think your post can be boiled down to logic. What I mean by this is grammar rules which don't logically work (like verb tense disagreement) are annoying and should be one of those rules we don't break for mere conventions sake, unless you are a painfully aware of what you are doing. On the other hand, starting sentences with conjunctions and even fragments don't logically mess up the sentence: it still flows.
And I agree with what you say about revision. I think writing is, a lot of the time, meticulous work. But it's so rewarding what you find those right words and right structure to convey your exact thought.