As a jazz musician once said, you’ve gotta know the rules to break them.
You need to learn the fundamentals first before you break them.
Given Lemmy’s demographic we can put it like this:
If you invent an entire programming language from first principles, you’re probably pretty smart.
If you’re in a a class at uni learning C++ and you submit code written in your new language, then you’re going to fail
It’s almost like English teachers are supposed to teach traditional writing norms. You know, like, as their jobs or something …
English prof up on a soapbox here.
Comments like “you have to learn the rules before you break them” are kind of missing the mark. For the most part, those of us who teach English/composition/literary criticism/etc aren’t particularly concerned with “rules” (with the exception maybe of English as a second or foreign language, where conventions/rules are used to scaffold learning rather than as universal truths). English teachers are familiar with linguistics and the fluid, messy nature of language and all the fun things we can do with it. The “grammar Nazis” you encounter online are VERY unlikely to be English teachers (though they likely were our most insufferable students), who are often the first to point out that language is constantly changing and that what’s considered “correct” depends heavily on … everything, really.
But we’re talking here, ostensibly, about a “class.” And if we’re talking about a class, we’re talking about a syllabus. Specific outcomes on which a course is responsible for improving and checking proficiency. Your English class isn’t necessarily about “learning English,” especially if English is your first language. It’s about getting you to become proficient at doing a specific selection of specific things with your language. Very often these things aren’t even about rules or grammar, but that doesn’t mean the expectations aren’t strict- and what most people read as strictness is usually just specificity.
It’s damn near impossible to know whether a curriculum, teacher, method, or activity is successful without an outcome to measure. Lack of specificity makes measurement difficult and potentially unfair. If you’re told to “write a persuasive essay,” what exactly does that mean? What separates an A from a C? How does the teacher justify that distinction, and how does the student know what they need to improve? Without very specific target structures or a “can do” inventory, assessment becomes messier and we leave students guessing about what an given teacher might want from them, which isn’t especially fair (or useful, from a pedagogical POV).
A teacher can understand perfectly well that language is flexible, that different contexts call for different kinds of language, and that conventions change over time, while still expecting students to demonstrate a particular skill according to given criteria. There isn’t one correct way to use English, but a class DOES needs to establish what it’s trying to do, what students are expected to be able to do, and how anyone can tell whether they’ve been successful. That’s not necessarily prescriptivism, it’s just how a curriculum works.
And this is why I taught math…
Math teachers also didn’t like how I arrived at my answers. I made little games and rules to try and predict the solution in a roundabout way rather than just doing the calculations “straight.”
And yeah it wasn’t as effective as the students following direction, but I was definitely having the most fun.
The “grammar Nazis” you encounter online are VERY unlikely to be English teachers
Still too many of them on the fediverse for my tastes, though the number has definitely dwindled since I first got on a few years back. I wish we had enough people interested in grammar (read: descriptivists) to make an active grammar comm here but it’s way too niche. I used to enjoy the discussions back on reddit but even over there it was still basically only a handful of people providing most of the answers that actually ended up leading to interesting conversations.
A young man asked Mozart how to write a symphony. Mozart replied, “You are too young to write a symphony.” The man said, “You were writing symphonies when you were 10 years of age.” Mozart said, “Yes, but I didn’t ask how to do it.”
TLDR;; if you’re a student then you’re a student, if you disagree, don’t ask, just do it and you will be recognized if your aim is true.
You need to know the rules to know how to break them with intention.
Cormac McCarthy doesn’t use punctuation because he “doesn’t believe in it”. His books are terrible to read. They’re clunky, unclear, difficult to parse, and read like a middle-schoolers first try at story time. James Joyce, his inspiration, same story; I can’t even get through one chapter of anything he’s ever written.
I realize I’m in the minority when I say this, but grammar has rules for a reason. When you don’t follow the same rules as everyone else, when you don’t adhere to the reader’s expectations, that makes it more difficult for the reader, not less.
If you were to take the list of all professional basketball players, and sort them by the number of free throws missed per game, you’d see the top of the list is dominated by Hall of famers.
That’s not because missing free throws makes for a good basketball player. Or even that it isn’t important in basketball to be able to make free throws. It still remains important at every level of the game! But some of the people who miss a lot of free throws were just so utterly dominant at other parts of the game that they had long successful basketball careers despite being bad at an important skill for basketball players.
Cormac McCarthy and James Joyce have a signature style, yes, but I’d argue that they’re successful despite that, rather than because of that.
The Road is one of my favorite pieces of writing. It’s art like anything else. The lack of punctuation really made it feel raw and close to home.
I think that’s the point too, you know? His writing style acts as a literary device in and of itself. It’s not always like that, but when it’s like that I feel it helps drive home the scene.
And I say that while I agree 100% that it’s hard to read.
The road felt like a stream of consciousness to me. It flowed so well that I tore through it in 2 days because I just couldn’t stop reading lol. I’d love to be* that immersed in a book again but nothing else I’ve read has come close
Have you read Gone Girl? That’s the single most unputdownable thing I’ve ever read
Joyce is meant to be read like poetry. It plays off the sound of the language. His stuff is genuinely awful to sit down and read, just like it would be awful to sit down and read through a collection of poetry (to me anyway). Some Authors play with language in a good way, like the way Hemingway rarely attributes dialogue and forces you to pay attention and understand why the character would say something like that. It also reads very minimalist and leaves a lot to your own imagination and voice.
And this is where I feel like the mental state of the reader affects the way they are likely to respond to a given text.
Whenever I’m reading a good book (or poetry), I am able to mentally narrate the text and enter a flow state. Dialog is narrated with purpose, and with a story it basically turns into a film in my mind. My appreciation of the text is affected by how well I can conceptualize it.
But my friend has aphantasia. He can read and understand the words on a page just fine, but that’s all they are to him. It’s hard to puzzle together certain elements of deeper meaning when all you’re really looking at is the relation of words to one another.
Point of clarification. I think there’s a big difference between reading something where your internal narrator is a beat poet as opposed to a broadcast news presenter. If you slowly absorb Joyce and narrate it yourself properly it can be enjoyed. But if you sit down and read it like you would a news article, just trying to scan for info as fast as you can, you miss the entire point of the endeavor.
I only read the beginning of the Ulysses (had to return the book sooner than expected) and the flowing of the words and concepts one into the other is absolutely unique. I felt like I was carried among by the gently flow of a river.
I agree. I read The Road recently since it’s my wife’s favorite book and holy shit it was exhausting at times. I enjoyed the story to a degree, but the stream-of-thought writing style and unspecific grammar took me out of it. If it had been written in a more understandable prose I think I would have enjoyed it more; but would it have been as famous then I wonder
The Road is so god damn depressing that the writing style was the least of my concerns while reading
I think you’re in the vast majority.
When it comes to the readers expectation, things become a lot more complex. I don’t remember the exact words, but Brandon Sanderson talked about promises to the reader, where it’s OK to do surprising things, but expectations must be carefully managed in that surprises must not feel like betrayal. Poor execution of this is why everyone hates the “…but it was all a dream” trope.
Ok theres 2 replies about Cormac McCarthy, there’s clearly something I’m missing contextwise about understanding rules and how to break them.
All I do, is sit down at the typewriter, and start hittin’ the keys. Getting them in the right order, that’s the trick. That’s the trick.
If anime taught me anything It’s that character development is just padding
This is the standard line, but a lot of the time I find it to be bullshit. Sure, Cormac McCarthy gets to look cool and modernist by not using quotation marks, but my view is you would spend less time trying to decipher narrator vs. character if he did use them, and you would have a better reading experience at the same time.
This is not an inflammatory response, I am just curious- How do you feel about “House of Leaves?”
Generally considered to be a phenomenal work of art, but it DEFINITELY doesn’t follow the vast majority of standard grammar rules.
I hadn’t even heard of it until your comment.
I respect going all in on breaking convention for the sake of art a lot more than leaving out punctuation as a style.
I agree- which is the way I believe most Cormac McCarthy fans view his writing style. I have never read his books, they aren’t for me- but I feel that bucking trends is the way art is meant to evolve. Some trends getting bucked are more annoying than others, though.
Do you have any authors that you suggest to others?
I tend to read books about religion and history, so there isn’t really a lot of breaking the mold there unfortunately.
Gormenghast and Neuromancer are the kind of heavy atmospheric and descriptive fiction I like, but they don’t really deviate from standard punctuation or presentation in any way.
Gormenghast… I read a translation si I wouldn’t know about grammar rules, but it definitely broke storytelling rules. The style of the descriptions, how description and action blend into one another, how decay becomes almost a tangible presence through the pages… a unique book by any means
Doesn’t Gormenghast have that dinner scene that’s a massive stream of consciousness curveball?
Edit: Book 1 Chapter 57 The Reveries
Well, I forgot about that. Looking at it, I’d say it was a part that I managed to get through quite quickly, since it wasn’t just describing the texture of a wall for a full page.
Fair enough- I had never heard of either of those before. However, I know Mervyn Peake has been a heavy inspiration of modern fiction. I may have to give the Gormenghast series a try- just super daunting.
Anyways, thanks for indulging my curiosity. Just had time to kill. Have a good one!
I thought House of Leaves dragged on, but I think the confusion was kind of the story too, you know? You have this scenario going on in the book, and the book itself has you looking left right up down here and there for the context.
Jumping in.
I tried ‘House’ and noped out about fifty pages in.
Too much work and not much payout.
imho it was a gimmick book.
“House of Leaves” challenges what is a book! Forget grammar, this is an identify crisis of narrative. Or is it even narrative at this point? Work of art, absolutely.
Yeah, you can break the law as long as you know what it says, right?
Fuck off, you bad faith shitstain.
Yes tbh, with the same reasoning too. The difference is if I do the right thing and break the law, the fun police (aka the actual police) will arrest me.
Yeah, you’re not good enough at it to do that.
99.99% of all MF’s that say some shit like “Yeah I got bad grades, but if they tested critical thinking then I would have cum loud or whatever”
Yeah ok brother. You couldn’t critically think your way through a 3 page structured essay but I’m sure you were just holding back.
To break the rules you gotta first learn the rules.
That being said I remember in late high school feeling pretty frustrated because I had a good grip on the rules by now and wanted to try adding some zest to my writing.
But zest is difficult to grade, my teachers were not paid well enough to deal with ambiguity and to be honest most of them didn’t strike me as particularly imaginative in the first place.
aw man… but you still write, I hope?
Not really. Sometimes I think about it but it’s sort of hard to find the time. My interests also just started to shift away from writing after high school.
Yea, it’s just that pedants deep down believe that good grammar is good writing; they don’t understand the difference. Therefore, they’re going to struggle to recognize good writing, and be incapable of producing it.
It doesn’t take a chef to spot a bad meal.
No- but since a good “meal” is subjective to the person eating it, one person calling it a bad meal is not a good metric to base your opinion on.
If the meal has seasonings you don’t like, or is missing components you do like (grammar, in this case)- it doesn’t make the meal bad. It just means it isn’t for you, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Missing grammar is the wrong grammar. And that’s more akin to a spoiled component.
You literally just started your sentence with a conjunction. At the very least practice what you preach.
You literally just started your sentence with a conjunction
And?
My own bad grammar somehow makes my statement wrong?
“Missing grammar” is usually not an issue unless you’re reading self-published, unedited books.
Rarity of it makes it more pronounced
And that’s your opinion. A subjective view of your own. See how that works?
I was going to ask if that went for lawyers as well, But then I realized it was obvious.
Bullshit. If ignorance of the rules is no excuse to avoid punishment, then knowledge of them cannot be either, because you should’ve known better.
This whole charade is merely a loophole to allow people to avoid saying “wow, this writer is really hot, therefore they are allowed to break the rules whenever they want to.”
Artistic rules are quite different from rules of law.
When making art, you should know the rules (and especially why they exist) before breaking them because the reason why each rule exists is that we figured out along the way that most ways of breaking it lead to worse art.Of course, tastes are different, but the basic aesthetic sensibilities of humans living in the same culture have a lot of overlap.
Knowing the rules leaves you much better equipped to achieve your desired effect on the consumers of your art. If you don’t know the rules of grammar, your text will likely be quite difficult to parse and, unless that was your intention or a worthwhile trade for some other effect you’re going for, this is probably sabotaging your writing.
When you break the rules, you introduce friction. If you don’t know why they exist, the “punishment” is that your art is not perceived as you intended.
That’s why I always read the applicable statute(s) before I run red lights and stop signs and ignore speed limits.
I know the rules, which means I get to break them, right?
no that’s not what that proverb means at all… but you know what you will get when you are caught.
The rules and norms of writing are not the same as laws. Either contribute something meaningful or fuck off.
I think you kinda have to learn the rules and prove you know them before you go wild breaking them.
That’s not always the case. Sometimes a writer is like Jimi Hendrix where there’s no need for elaborate theory backing them because they can just straight up fucking play. But it’s usually the case, and the overwhelming majority of teachers are teaching extremely usual people.
I remember in my one college-level creative writing class I had to read other people’s work and it read like an eight year old wrote it.
I always preferred the “Strippers, JFK and Stalin” version that I’m too lazy to find an image for
When saying the second why use a comma at all?
Generally, you don’t need one here.
I think people put them there to force a pause, which does make sense, verbally.
You have to know the rules, why they exist, and what breaking them implies.
If you are in a class designed to teach the rules, it doesn’t even matter if you already did all 3 steps. You’ll fail the class because the class is testing if you CAN follow the rules.
But I signed up for a writing class not a following the rules class. Basically all classes are follow the rules classes if we are going to look at it like that
I guarantee your writing class has a syllabus. The problem here is a disconnect between what you think the syllabus says and what it actually says (this may not be your fault- a lot of teachers are notoriously shit at communicating the purpose of the syllabus).
Get your homework published and fight your teacher.
Novels are art. English teachers are not teaching you how to write as an art form. This is because our schools are designed to make good little worker bees. They are teaching you language so that you can then go on to learn technical writing. Now, I do think they should split the two apart, and let kids experiment and have fun with writing. That does not mean that they are wrong. Technical writing requires precision and a strict adherance to rules. It is the same concept as it being entirely fine to have a bit of fun when painting a mural, but not when you’ve been hired to paint someones house.
Students when English teacher get pregnant and she’s off for this year. Again.
