I vary, depending upon the tone I want to set. What's the best way of conjuring up a reader's interest? Sometimes you just have to charge ahead and the grammar be damned. Of course, if we depart too radically from "good" grammar, we run the risk of being confusing. Nothing turns off a reader so quickly as becoming "confused". I sure wish I were a better writer.
It seems I wasted so much of my youth being content with really sloppy writing. Being young, I was also impatient about structuring what seemed to be a chaotic world. I loved Bee-Bop, and the stream of consciousness. A laser beam cutting straight through countless planes of existence. I started to pay real attention to my writing in law school. For every course we had to be aware of hundreds of cases every week. So you become really impatient with Justices who don't get to the point. For every case we had to write a brief outlining the facts of the case, the rules of law related to the case, and then a detailed summary of the Justice's opinions.
At a later date I was responsible for writing the manuals and orders for a large metropolitan police force. I wrote them with the same attention that I had so painfully learned in law school. Veteran police officers were scratching their heads as to what the order required of them personally. The orders themselves were perfectly straight forward, but not properly constructed for men more noted for their ability to project authority than for handling legal style writing. The Department sent me to a two day writing seminar, and writing became fun again.
To write well, you have to care about your message, and your reader. If they don't read what you've written, you've failed your task as a writer. You are to blame (bad writer, bad), not the poor hapless reader. If you have ideas, how else would you communicate them with our fellow creatures? The spoken word is just a puff of wind, soon forgotten. Unless, of course, you're Lincoln at Gettysberg. For most of us, only writing has the potential of fully communicating what we think about the world around us. Writing is fundamental to what we characterize as modern civilization.
Asherman wrote:What's the best way of conjuring up a reader's interest? Sometimes you just have to charge ahead and the grammar be damned.
Agreed. Another "guideline" of good writing I was always taught was to keep things in the active voice. It's completely sensible but I find that it sometimes comes into conflict with another guideline that I consider to be a higher priority: save the most important part of the sentence for last. In my opinion, there are situations in which the passive voice heightens the effect of the sentence, or at least inflects it enough to make a difference. For example, I can imagine contexts in which it would be more desirable to write "The man was killed by a stray bullet" than to write "A stray bullet killed the man."
I thought I posted on this thread earlier, but I must have demurred.
I'm a serial killer comma person. I like those commas for the clarity; that is, when there needs to be clarity, and not in cases when items are grouped, no example offhand. I'm speaking in principle, as my a2k posts are famously all over the place.
Of course it's called the Oxford comma, who else would be involved in holding English and the English firmly in the eighteenth century?
Joe(now let's talk about the over use of parenthetical remarks)Nation
Obviously I'm late to this game, but here's my 2 cents.
Oxford comma? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Here's my Awful Example of what can happen if you leave it out.
Story goes, a young writer published his first book. He wrote the following dedication:
"To my parents, God and Ayn Rand."
That is absolutely beautiful.
