Writing Fundamentals: Understanding Rules

The last post in our series (for now!) exploring the fundamentals of writing is all about rules, why it is important to understand them and how you can bend them for your own use.

In this post:

• You can break the rules, but first…

• Why we have rules

• Grammar, punctuation, spelling and usage crash course

• Copyediting

• Breaking with or without understanding

You can break the rules, but first…

You have to know what you’re breaking. It’s cliche, but it’s an oft-repeated adage for a reason. What’s more, you have to understand why we have rules in the first place.

Maybe you’re raring to go and just can’t wait to do some funky things with grammar. If you’re e.e. cummings (often stylized lowercase), great! But even he had to start somewhere. Brushing up on the rules is a great way to go.

The rules exist to satisfy these three principles of strong writing: consistency, clarity and accuracy.

When reading board game instructions, if you come across a figure called the “General,” you’d expect that piece to be called the “General” the whole way through. If you later read about a piece called the “Sergeant” and it turns out this is the same as the “General,” your confusion would be understandable. That’s where consistency comes in. But even encountering the “general” in lowercase rather than uppercase could give you pause. The rules indicate that it’s appropriate to always capitalize the word since it’s a proper name.

If a piece of writing contains poor grammar, each error dulls the effect of the writing to the reader and impacts its overall message. Readers might take the piece less seriously, or find it difficult to access in the first place. The principle of clarity governs these rules.

Accuracy, meanwhile, might conjure ideas of meticulously fact-checking every datum presented in a work, but that’s only part of it. We also apply the rules of accuracy to ensure we’re using the right words and meanings, and that the internal logic or facts of our writing is sound. If Timmy goes down to the shop with his grandmother every Tuesday, but we’re later told his mother is actually accompanying him, we might be pulled out of our reading for a moment, or worse, find the writing less credible.

Grammar, punctuation, spelling and usage crash course

Now that we have the principles, we can examine the rules themselves. These are divided into the usual English class suspects: grammar, punctuation, spelling and usage. This might sound a bit familiar, but it does bear repeating.

Grammar is how words work together. It’s how we get subjects to agree with objects and verbs, how we ensure we’re using the right tenses and how we communicate to our loved ones that we’d like it if they could pick us up a a single donut versus a dozen donuts for us on their way home.

Punctuation is used in tandem with grammar. These are the marks on the page that corral the letters. We use them to remind our readers to pause and take a break so they don’t run out of oxygen and pass out on the floor while reading the ever-intriguing and somewhat mystifying misadventures of our youth in our extremely long-winded memoir. You get the picture. But it’s also things like dashes and hyphens (and the difference between them) and where quotation marks go and which ones to use, or when we need to capitalize words or compound them.

Spelling is probably the easiest to grasp (though not always easy to execute). Having a single source of truth can make everything a lot easier, so you’d think we’d only have one definitive spelling for each word in the English language. Alas, we do not. It’s why you can get disagreements between Merriam-Webster and Oxford, or why there’s more than one dictionary in the first place.

Usage is sometimes discussed and lamented amongst native English speakers, but these rules have been the source of utter frustration for anyone learning English after their first language. Words mean different things. The same word might mean the same thing. That word you think ought to work in that particular spot might not actually, even if the etymology suggests it should. The list goes on.

Of course, we have the technology (especially these days) to discover what rules we need to apply in each situation. No one, not even editors (much as it would make the job easier) can remember everything. What’s important is finding out where that rule lives.

Keep in mind that English is an ever-evolving language. Sometimes you’ll find the rule has moved and now your address book needs updating, or that the same rule has multiple residences and you’ll have to figure out which one to visit. The point is—in all this uncertainty, finding the rule that’s right for you in your particular context is important. These choices make up the work’s style (though somewhat distinct from the style of your writing).

Copyediting

You might now be thinking that there’s an awful lot of pomp and circumstance to the simple act of writing. And there is, but as we said, it’s there for a reason. Even if you figure a majority of your audience wouldn’t care how you wrote it, the simple fact is ignoring the rules hurts your writing and its chances of being read and understood.

But fear not—though writing is often seen as a lonely pursuit, we can choose to involve others in our work. Sometimes that’s a trusted friend who has a good grasp on language, maybe it’s beta readers, or perhaps it’s a copyeditor who hones in on the rules to ensure your piece is consist, clear and accurate. Not to be confused with proofreading, which happens after the piece has been formatted into its final product, copyediting is done to refine and polish the language of the work while it’s still in draft form.

Along that same vein, something that will make reviewing your work easier (whether reviewed by you or someone else) is keeping a style sheet. Style sheets are used in editing to note down particular style choices (e.g., are your headings in sentence case or all capitalized? Is it USA or U.S.A.?) of a work to ensure the style is applied consistently, but no one ever said authors can’t make their own. If you do hire or work with an editor at any point, they’ll certainly appreciate it.

Breaking with or without understanding

At the end of the day, it’s your writing and you can certainly break the rules if you’d like. Your readers will only really care if it’s on purpose or not.

Mistakes in the writing erode the reader’s trust, and it can happen proportionately to the mistake itself. A simple spelling error might evade most readers’ notice, but mistakes in accuracy, especially for well-known facts, may hurt more. Don’t fret too much—no one, not even editors, are able to catch everything all the time.

Conversely, if you understand the rules, you can command the language to do as you’d like, rather than the other way around. Writers are not are not slave to their work (unless by some magical curse). Take e.e. cummings, for example. If you’ve read any of his poetry, you’ll note there’s a method to his rule-breaking, and it results in language that shimmers on the page.

The best kind of rule-breaking is additive. There is reason and understanding behind it. It’s the kind of thing that makes your readers smile when they come across it. What else can I say? Understanding rules.

Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.

She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.