I tend to think of The Rules as more of a wordle cloud – different sizes, different colors (yet complementary if possible), and often at right angles to each other but not quite colliding. It looks haphazard and disorganized, but there’s somehow a harmony to it.

Others in comments and in email to me: No where in the post above did I say people must eschew learning the various different grammars of English.

(See also Scott’s comment above.)

Au contraire, especially for writers, the more you know about languages, including the many different approaches to describing their grammars, the more tools and resources you have at your fingertips. That’s one of the many reasons I spent many years studying linguistics.

The more you know about what you do the more versatile your writing becomes.

However, I also know some writers who aren’t entirely clear on what a “gerund” is or “subjunctive” who have no idea about the debates over what the infinitive in English actually is. In short who know very little about formal descriptions of the language they make a living writing and yet are perfectly good writers . . .

I’m fine with descriptivism, as long as the words don’t hurt. “Impactful” hurts. “Truthiness” and “Google” are interesting.

Also, good dialogue in books and on TV very often bears little resemblance to the way people talk to each other in real life. Real conversation is supplemented by tone of voice, facial expressions, hand gestures and other body language, not to mention false starts, verbal tics, grammatical mistakes and so on.

Apostrophe misuse I think is a case of people thinking they’re following the rules but getting them wrong, too (why else would you include a typed character if you didn’t think you needed it? Besides typos), but they’re not quite so jarring to the flow of reading as extraneous commas.

The people I teach were not taught any grammar, except if they learned a language other than English, so it’s like giving them a bigger box of crayons once they realise they can use Rules to increase the emotional impact on their readers.

There’s other ways of teaching grammar, too. Don’t say “avoid adverbs” when what you really mean is “say ‘dashed’, ‘bolted’, ‘flew’, ‘scurried’ or ‘hurtled’ rather than ‘ran fast’.” Gorgeous strong verbs, English has. Love them. Use them. It’s the “thou shalt not” attitude of proscriptivists which gets on my nerves, not the proscription itself.

English is a wonderfully flexible language, and that’s why I love it. I’ll happily split infinitives where necessary, and end sentences on a preposition if I think it’s appropriate. English is at least 50% a Germanic language, and there’s no need for it to conform to Latin rules unless you want it to.

@ Ali – have you read Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker? That’s set in a post-apocalyptic Kent in an interesting future phonetic language that you soon get the hang of*. And Iain Banks’s Feersum Endjinn is partly told in strange spellings.

*Ending sentences with a preposition is something I am happy to do but some prescriptivists proscribe.

So. I’m lazy with grammar and my spelling is atrocious. Well, often it is so. Lately I have had days where my hands type entirely different words than the ones I commanded them to type.

It would obviously be absurd to insist that speakers of Jamaican English have to know the rules of “standard” US usage to write in their own dialect. So why assert that folks writing in other English vernaculars need to know standard editorial rules in order to “break” them? The answer is, they don’t, because they’re not actually breaking anything.

It’s always helpful to know stuff, of course. And being able to run rings around grammar snobs is fun (and helpful at the copyediting stage). But to suggest that you have to know a dominant rule set in order to write inside another rule set reminds me of those people who say, “Picasso’s abstracts are only good because he could draw realistically if he wanted.” Obviously, painting realistically is a great thing to be able to do, and is an ability that affects everything else you paint, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to painting well in an abstract mode.

So I would change, “You have to know the rules to break them” to something much less elegant, like, “Knowing any rule set increases your proficiency with other rule sets, and knowing standardized rule sets is particularly useful when dealing with representatives of the dominant culture, especially the asshats.”

At any rate, lathes are still for wood-working, and not a good synonym for licking. Even when I know what word you meant to use, your use of the wrong one can be detrimental to my continuation in the story (without hysterical laughter).

I don’t tut others for their tragic lack of “whom” (see?), although depending on the background and social class of your narrator, my grandparents would tend to indicate that “whom” would be absolutely required for a 1930s-appropriate dialect. No pomposity about it!

That said, though, I think the fears that language will degrade are legit. Yes, the English language is huge and unwieldy, but it’s also brilliant and nuanced, with three words for every single possible thing you might want to say. And there’s a real danger of losing these words and nuances for the wrong reasons — because a huge portion of our population is speaking LOLspeak and communicating in under 140 characters (says someone who does do both). That’s not evolving — it’s devolving, because it’s a sub-set of English intended for a specific purpose which is now being used everywhere. Yeah, I am all for breaking the rules — if you know them first.

And this little bit to add: Words are often thought of as a writer’s tools. But really, they are our raw material. We use them like paint, tones/notes/scales/rhythms, clay, granite, thread/yarn/raffia, metals,etc….to create…something.

Is there a single proper way to use paint? To sculpt granite? To play a tune? To weave? To make jewelry? The other arts get a much longer leash,and reward their leash-breakers far more often. Not sure why, but am increasingly annoyed by it.