I am a mixed bag of grammar and usage rules. Some I flaunt openly, and others I follow as if my life depended on it. I get angry when I see a misplaced apostrophe in a takeout menu. I want to mark up ads and send them back to the agency/advertiser when I see the use of the word “impact” for anything other than a car crash or “quality” used with no modifier as an endorsement of a product.
The rules I follow:
- Don’t use unnecessary words. If a word can be deleted without changing the meaning of a sentence, it probably should be.
- Avoid adverbs. Stephen King convinced me of this one. Adverbs can clutter prose, especially when they are used in dialogue tags. The verbs should be strong enough to convey meaning without modification. There are exceptions, of course, and I will use an adverb where necessary.
- Stick with “that” to introduce a restrictive relative clause. Some grammarians argue against this one, but I see no reason not to make the distinction between that for restrictive clauses and which for non-restrictive.
- Delete that. Other than using “that” to introduce a restrictive clause, I strive to delete “that” from my writing. Oh, I use it. All the time, in fact. And I don’t catch all of the “thats” that clutter my text.
The rules I ignore:
- Split infinitives. If the sentence reads better with an adjective in between “to” and the the verb, then I will split my infinitive.
- Prepositions. I take a natural language approach to my syntax. If a sentence works with a preposition at the end, no problem for me.
- Following the word “help” with the infinitive, including “to.” Does a guide to grammar “help writers practice good usage” or “help writers to practice good usage”? What? Both phrases mean exactly the same thing, but one contains three more characters? Yeah. I leave out the “to” on a regular basis.
- Avoid negatives. We speak in negatives all the time, and there is no reason the word “not” should be avoided like the plague. Some of the constructions I’ve seen that avoid “not” are tortured and much longer than they need to be.
What about you? What are your favorite grammatical rules? Which should tossed out post haste?
Sunday Wash-Up, 1st November « Shack's Comings and Goings // Oct 31, 2009 at 4:02 pm
[...] Grammar: Do You Think the Rules are Stodgy or Stately? Jennifer Roland admits to being a mixed bag when it comes to grammar usage. She tells us which rules she chooses to follow and which ones she flaunts. [...]