Breaking the rules? You’ve got some explaining to do!

In her entertaining book about punctuation (no, that’s not an oxymoron) Eats, Shoots & Leaves, author Lynne Truss applies this “rather unfair rule” to student writers tempted to experiment like best-selling novelists with the intentional comma splice: “only do it if you’re famous.”

Intentionally breaking the rules of grammar for stylistic purposes can be a liberating and exhilarating exercise. My advice about this is to reserve experimentation for personal writing or for assignments in a creative writing class. For the traditional college paper, you should obey the rules.

If, however, you believe it is stylistically necessary to break a grammatical rule in your paper, I suggest two courses of action:

1.) Alert your professor about your intention before your paper is due. Point out that intentional sentence fragment or comma splice, and explain your reasons for wanting to use it.

2.) Have a reason for using it! If you break a rule, you must have a superb reason for doing so and be able to articulate that reason to your professor.

Here is a great example from Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Lynne Truss engages in a debate with her publisher about the Oxford comma in one of her sentences. The Oxford, or serial, comma is the last comma before “and” in a series. For example: I like potatoes, hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, and BLTs. The last comma in this sentence is the so-called Oxford comma.

Truss writes:

For example, in the introduction to this book ... I allude to punctuation marks as the traffic signals of language: “they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.” And, well, I argued for that Oxford comma. It seemed to me that without the comma after “detour”, this was a list of three instructions (the last a double one), not four. And here was a case where the stylistic reasons for its inclusion clearly outweighed the grammatical ones for taking it out. This was a decelerating sentence. The commas were incrementally applying the brakes. To omit the comma after “detour” would have the sentence suddenly coasting at speed again instead of slowing to a final halt.

If you can explain your reasons for making a stylistic decision as clearly and succinctly as Truss does in her remarks above, then I imagine your professor will approve it.

And, as an aside, re-read the first sentence of this blog post (Truss’s “entertaining book about punctuation”). There’s an important lesson implicit in that phrase: Good writing can make even the most prosaic topics interesting; dull writing can make the most interesting subject in the world dreary and boring.

PS -- check out Weird Al Yankovic's new parody song about grammatical errors, "Word Crimes":

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.